


3:24 am, still no starbucks.

by wildechilde17



Series: Starbucks and infants [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Avengers Tower, BAMF Pepper Potts, Baby, Baby Names, Before age of ultron ruins any sense of canon compliance, Domestic Avengers, F/M, Fluff, Parent Clint Barton, Parent Natasha Romanov, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Protective Clint Barton, Protective Natasha Romanov, Unplanned Pregnancy, deadpool's chapter is pure crack fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-18
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-03-23 14:12:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 28
Words: 42,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3771223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildechilde17/pseuds/wildechilde17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“This better be important J,” he answers without looking up from the worktop.</p><p>“Yes Sir, there is a Mr Clint Barton at the security gates to the Tower’s garage.”</p><p>“Good for him,” he says lightly barely acknowledging the unimportance of random people who try to gain access to Iron Man and Avengers Tower. “Scan the car, tell him we have sharks with lasers on their heads to eat the paparazzi.”</p><p>JARVIS fails to take the hint and his fast pace, guitar led music fails to cut back in. “Mr Barton says you may remember him as Legolas.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tony Stark

He was still allowed to work through the night when Pepper was out of the country, if he wasn’t caught. Allowed was probably too strong a word to use.

While he could 3D print many of the components he preferred on occasion the feel of the tools in his hands. His music was just loud enough to slow the racing of his thoughts and the coffee black enough that he might get this done before Pepper came back and told him that even superheroes needed to sleep and tricked him into it with her feminine wiles. Such wiles that woman had.

His [Music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NdHySPJr8I) cuts out.

“Sir?”

“This better be important J,” he answers without looking up from the worktop.

“Yes Sir, there is a Mr Clint Barton at the security gates to the Tower’s garage.”

“Good for him,” he says lightly barely acknowledging the unimportance of random people who try to gain access to Iron Man and Avengers Tower. “Scan the car, tell him we have sharks with lasers on their heads to eat the paparazzi.”

JARVIS fails to take the hint and his fast pace, guitar led music fails to cut back in. “Mr Barton says you may remember him as Legolas.”

“Legolas? _AGENT_ Barton?!” This makes him put down the screw driver.

“Mr Barton says you cannot be an agent of a defunct agency.”

“Does he now? Notify Hill.” He spins on his stool away from the work desk and the newly forgotten project. “Give me a visual.” The green blue of the holographic display flashes before him. He flicks his wrist to expand the camera view of the blond former SHIELD agent in a silver car. Data on the car and the occupants scrolls beside the video image. A quick beat on the image and he can hear the man’s fingertips tapping out an irregular rhythm on the outside of his car door.

“The archer formally known as Agent Barton?”

“Mr Stark,” Barton says looking towards the most obvious of the security cameras though Tony catches the way the man’s eyes flick quickly over three other harder to pin point lenses.

“We have you down as dead. Or Hydra. Or both.”

“‘Fraid you’re gonna have to change those records, man,” Barton says easily.

“Yeah?” Tony says raising an eyebrow, “Forgive me if I don’t rush to do that without some kind of evidence.”

“Fuck man, you gonna make me wake her? Even after New York?”

There is a kind of audacity to the light cursing that pisses Tony off. 3: 24 am in the morning, the clock in the corner of his display flashes and though he normally wouldn’t give two shits about the abstract nature of time, he gives plenty of fucks about former SHIELD agents thinking he is some kind of halfway house for lost spies. Fury and his lot always taking liberties, the kind of liberties that gets him almost stuck on the wrong side of wormholes and having fucking panic attacks.

“I didn’t exactly want to run with your lying liars who lie before Cap pulled a ‘the emperor has no clothes’ and you Katniss, your record for joining club evil isn’t exactly spotless,” he counts out the ways in which this is not happening, “So hows about you turn that impressively non-descript car around and make an appointment with… Wait. Wake who?”

“Sir, the vehicle has two other occupants,” JARVIS supplies and Tony drags across the data on the car.

“Yeah, a sleep deprived assassin,” Barton offers tiredly, “this ones on you Stark. Just you remember that. Tash. Tash. Wake up, we’re here.” The archers arm stretches out of view and is accompanied by the muffled sounds of his passenger coming to unhappily. There is the hushed sound of the man coxing a response as Tony flicks through his holographical scan of the vehicle pulling up the dimensions of the front seat passenger. Female, 5ft 4…

“Stark doesn’t trust me as far as he can throw me.” He recognizes that husky voice dripping with disdain. He flicks left for another camera angle to grab a better screen shot of a tired looking redhead.

“Agent Romanoff?” The last he heard of her was through Rogers. Gone to ground. Rebuilding covers destroyed in the fall. He’d had to go back to her files more than once feeling sick and strangely ashamed reading the history he couldn’t quite make fit with the woman who’d first come to him as Natalie Rushman from legal.

“Not an agent, Stark. Will you let us up? Captain Rogers will vouch for me.”

“That takes care of you and I suppose you think your word for the blond will work but what about person number three?” Flick and drag, cross hairs form around the heat signature in the back of the car, “Who’s really fucking small?” Faster than average heart rate for a person asleep. Britax B-Safe Infant car seat. “An infant?”

“Drive Clint,” she says allowing him to imagine the sigh that should go with the resignation in her voice. “He’ll let us up now just to hear the story.” Romanoff charming as always.

“Better be or Laser sharks,” he says glibly as the archer nods sharply at his partner’s orders.

“J allow our master assassin friends entry and pull up everything you have on Former Agent Barton and Former Agent Romanoff."

Natasha Romanoff leaves his elevator first. Her simple loose fitting sweater and pants tucked neatly into black boots makes her look very unlike Natalie or even Agent Romanoff. When she looks up at him standing on the raised mezzanine there is the familiar hardness in her eyes and the way her longer hair is still more reminiscent of blood than Pepper’s own strawberry waves.

“Agent Romanoff the no longer,” he grins, “missed me?”

Romanoff twists slightly towards the exiting archer, the curve of her mouth hardens a little and she throws a hand signal low next to her thigh towards her partner. For his part the archer shakes his head and shrugs unevenly. As Tony makes his way across the floor to the stairs he can see why the man’s shrug remained unilateral, a baby carrier in his left hand.

“So assassination and spy craft wasn’t giving you a high anymore and you decided to try your hand at kidnap?”

Romanoff growls. Tony raises his eyebrows.

“She’s mine,” Clint Barton says bluntly.

“That’s where you were when me and mine were being targeted by the shadowy organisation you worked for? Making more assassins?” Tony throws out as he gestures with his scotch.

“No,” Romanoff says, her voice low and forbidding, “that’s what I was doing.”

“You what?!”

“Tasha, you said this guy was a genius,” Barton says behind her.

“I also said he was a narcissist. You wanted to come here.”

“So when you said she was yours…” Natasha turns as he approaches clearly manoeuvring herself between him and Barton, between him and the baby carrier in Barton’s hand. “You meant the both of them.”

“Natasha isn’t anyone’s, Mr Stark.”

“You two made a…” he says fighting down a sudden sleep deprived feeling of hysteria.

“We need your help, they targeted you and yours?  Imagine what they’d be willing to do to get their hands on the Black Widow’s daughter,” Barton says flatly, clearly unaffected by the way Romanoff stands between them like a wild animal protecting her young.

“You want _my_ help? Aren’t you the two most deadly people on the planet?” he looks between the two former agents, Barton has a bearing he has always associated with Rhodey, an almost casual physical threat built into easy going body language and Romanoff has shed any of the coquettishness she’d used to play him so well and is all calculation and claws.

“I have a bow and arrows. I need superheroes.”

“Didn’t SHIELD have, I don’t know, fraternization rules?” Tony asks as Barton bends to lift a sleeping baby from the carrier. He won’t step closer with Romanoff standing in fighting stance between them, all he sees is a purple blanketed bundle pulled close to her father’s chest with surprising gentleness.

“I’ve never been great with rules Mr Stark and if what Natasha says is true neither have you,” he shakes his head, “She’s barely a month old. I can work, I can… this is the safest place for her.” Tony suspects this is the closest he will come to begging.

“Sir, Ms Hill says she’ll be here in twenty minutes.” Both agents look up at JARVIS’s interruption.

“I assume no one else knows about junior?”

“I have been keeping secrets for as long as I could speak,” Natasha says speaking suddenly.

“And stealing them too,” he answers her darkly, Natasha only stares unabashed. “Right, hey JARVIS make sure we’re recording when Hill finds out about baby Bond here.”

“Her name is Elizabeth,” Barton offers looking down at the bundle. Tony gets the sense that this piece of information is offered as the overture to a bargain.

Tony sighs, “Such a missed opportunity to name her Merida.”

“Merida?” Barton asks, a frown forming.

“Yeah, little red headed Scottish girl with a bow?” Nothing, “Brave? Disney Pixar?” Neither assassin reacts. “Seriously? Does no one on the team understand pop culture?”

“Team?” Natasha echoes.

“The Avengers? Heroes of New York?” he says expansively, “Even you should have heard of us.”

“Surely the Avengers initiative was shut down with SHIELD.”

“Didn’t you hear Ms Romanoff, I’m privatizing world peace.” At this Romanoff rolls her eyes but he takes it as a victory as she appears a fraction less likely to tear his head from his shoulders.

“Will you help us?” asks Barton.

“Don’t think I can refuse, I’m Pokemoning.”

“ _Pokemoning?!_ ” Natasha says a soft kind of outrage in her voice.

“Gotta catch them all,” he smiles and takes his time with his scotch before continuing, “You two are part of the set… provided you don’t turn out to be octopus heads, of course.”

“We are not Hydra,” Natasha says.

Tony only nods at the cheapness of her word, “I have this fantastic new security coordinator, delightfully mean, gets along with Pep a little too much for my liking. She’ll be here in 20 minutes”

“18 minutes 12 seconds, Sir”

“Maria?” Barton asks and Tony sees Natasha give him the same kind of sharp nod he’d seen Barton give her in the car.

“She doesn’t let me call her that,” he answers casually, “Can I see the rug rat while we wait?”

Barton’s sharp eyes look towards his partner and he must see some kind of sign she will allow it because he shifts the child in his arms and steps closer. Tony leans forward, in the bundle there is an infant with a small round face, as fair as Natasha with full lips and delicate lashes closed against her cheeks, no hair as yet.

“You’re lucky, she takes after her Mom. Not that you aren’t a very handsome, totally able to kill me with your bare hands, guy”

“Lucky doesn’t even begin to cover it,” Barton says softly as the baby’s eyes open, “Nat, she’s waking up.”

Tash, Tasha, Nat, small names, intimate names all used so thoughtlessly for a woman as deadly as the spider she was named for, it’s as if Barton doesn’t fear her at all. “She’ll be hungry.”

“I take it she doesn’t eat shawarma yet?” and there is a second eye roll.

Natasha turns again excluding him more thoroughly though she quickly taps her chest, then pinching her thumbs and two fingers together motions downwards twice away from her body towards the infant in Barton’s arms. Her hands shift again, two peace sighs laid on top of each other circling away from her body before her dominate hand comes up to pinch and twist a pea sized piece of air at her temple. She seems to smirk before tapping her partner on the chest once and taking the squirming child from his arms.

“I’ll be in the lounge,” she says coolly.

“What was that?” Tony asks watching her circle wide so as not to brush past him to get to the mezzanine. When he turns back to the archer he sees the faint echo of the grin he must have flashed Natasha.

“ASL.”

“Latin, ASL…” Tony muses, then more loudly he adds, “You know I have multiple PHDs?”

“Careful, Man, you sound like you’re competing.” Barton hands were a fraction larger than proportionality should dictate and Tony watches with interest as the absence of the child makes Barton examine the callouses on his fingertips before pushing them down into his pockets. The dry response had born no hint of the usual deference or unease that people asking Tony Stark for favors layered over their speech. In a way it reminded him of Fury but without the pulpit like fervor or sense of omnipotence.

He grins brightly bringing his voice back to performance level, “Hi, have you met me? I’m awesome. I don’t compete.”

“If you did, I wouldn’t choose her to go up against. That woman performs miracles.” Barton’s eyes follow Natasha and the infant to the lounge on the upper level.

“I know that look. I see it in mirrors when I’m around Pepper.”

“Then you know I’ll do anything to keep them safe.”

“Yeah. I think I can help you out with that.” He takes another drink.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Actual signs [I] [feed (with directionality towards infant)] [Take care of] [Pea brain/Moron] [You]  
> Gloss for ASL - I will feed her, you take care of the moron.
> 
> Click on the link to hear Tony's music before JARVIS cuts it.


	2. Tony Stark never shuts up

“You know he’s standing guard, and just taking it, out there,” Tony says entering through a side door. Natasha doesn’t flinch at his presence, placing the infant back into the black carrier.

“Yes,” she says perfunctorily as the argument outside the door ebbs again.

“And you aren’t married or something?”

“Something?” she asks blankly and he flounders for the other options, do assassins have boyfriends? Do spy’s boyfriends all look that menacing? If he says partner will she only agree on the most sinister of buddy cop terms. Significant political murder other?

“You clearly mated,” he says and points to the little Barton/Romanoff hybrid staring innocently into the space not three inches from her face.

“Stark, I am not an actual spider nor am I some fantasy you have from noir films.”

“You sure? I’ve seen the gams on you and you are the kind of smoking hot red head to lead a man down no good alley.”

She’s quiet, she doesn’t smile like Natalie would though she uses the same face and he knows Agent Romanoff would have pressed her lips together fighting back an unprofessional smile at very least for the pathetic nature of the joke. It’s clear that this woman is someone he doesn’t know.

“You’ve read my file,” she says and it isn’t a question. He can’t lie to her when she looks up from adjusting the baby’s blanket, it would be like lying to Pepper, those eyes know too much.

“I’ve read all the files.”

“She isn’t supposed to be here.” There is an uncomfortable stillness to her. Tony finds himself wishing Barton and Hill would start an all-out brawl on the other side of the door. He doesn’t do honesty, emotion, tact. He wants to make a bad joke, pay someone to deal with this for him, he wants three more drinks before he has to talk about the Soviets and twenty eight little girls on stainless steel tabletops worked over like they were science experiments… not even, because if someone treated Dum E and U like… little girls pumped full of drugs and cut open… He shivers before he opens his mouth to speak.

“The science, that wasn’t good science… and humans they make errors.”

“Are you certain that is it? Two stitches too few? A slip with the laser? An ovum too stubborn to be stopped?” She shakes her head. This Natasha Romanoff doesn’t hope, he’s seen her do that before. He scans through his memories of video play back from the helicarrier after Loki, ‘still not gonna find them in time’, ‘one of our own’.

“Banner’s here. He’s been doing mostly theoretical work. When you picked him up he was working as a medical doctor.” He shoves his hands in his pockets as he paces, “I can scan you, the kid, Barton if you like. But do you really want to know the answer?”

“To keep her safe I think I must.”

“You think he wants to know?” he gestures with his head to the ongoing argument outside the door.

“Clint’s heart will remain unchanged whatever the outcome.”

“You’re that sure about him?” Tony’s never been that sure about anyone. He’s never been that sure of himself. He is definitely not certain about Barton even if he isn’t Hydra. His SHIELD file might say text book narcissism, compulsive, prone to self-destruction but Barton’s says adrenalin junkie, PTSD and an inability to function in a command structure.

“When I am sure of nothing else, I am sure of him,” she says closing her eyes.

“Angelucci was fuckin’ Hydra trash!” Barton yells outside the door.

“And the reason you didn’t attempt contact…”

“For fucks sake Hill, do you even listen to yourself?” Barton cuts across the imposing voice of Maria Hill, “Fury dead, Coulson dead, I made contact with the one fucking person I knew WASN’T HYDRA.”

“He sounds sure of you,” Tony says.

“Fallaces sunt rerum species.”

“Now,” he clicks his fingers, “I know that doesn’t mean you can have a car take me back to Malibu.”

“No,” she says but doesn’t offer a translation.

He sighs still attempting to wrap his head around the information this morning has brought. “You have a baby. And a…”

“Hawkeye.”

“Huh,” he blinks, she almost smiles when she says that. A smile for a call sign. “You have a baby and a Hawkeye.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Whatever tests you want,” Barton agrees in a way that sounds far too much like a fuck you for Hill to accept easily.

“And the infant,” Hill demands.

“You lay one electrode near my kid and I swear to God you won’t even hear the arrow that kills you.”

The hair on Tony’s arms stands up at that threat, “That’s why he’s standing guard?”

“He’s read my file too. He saw the end result.” He’d been sent to kill her. SHIELD had taken out much of the Red Room but by that time she was rogue and making a name for herself. The files themselves never explained how the sniper they’d sent to neutralize her had convinced her to come in instead. Other files seemed to indicate the hierarchy expected the young agent to come back in a body bag rather than with a young but prolific assassin in tow.

“Don’t get me wrong SHIELD, not my favorite people, but you really think they’d… to a kid?”

“I won’t take that chance.”

“Sure. But Hill works for me now.” Her eyes narrow, scrutinizing him.

“You’ll keep your employee, he won’t kill her.” There’s an odd lilt in the word employee.

“You don’t get in there until I say Maria,” Barton growls while Tony makes a study of Natasha’s impassive stare.

“Barton, move aside. I need to speak to Romanoff.” There is silence for a moment then, “I don’t take kindly to insubordination.”

“To be insubordinate I’d have to be your fucking subordinate.”

“I’m not much for babies, spent a lot of time making sure I didn’t get one.”

“That you know of…” she smiles wickedly and for a second he worries she knows something he doesn’t. Pepper would kill him. Pepper would make him be a proper father. Then she’d kill him.

“She’s kind of cute. Looks like you. Except around the eyes.”

“She has her father’s eyes,” Romanoff replies.

“Murderous?” he asks raising an eyebrow.

“Blue,” she says without blinking.

“Right.”

The battle seems to have died down, Hill and Barton coming to some kind of détente. Natasha looks up at him again, looking suddenly younger and uncertain.

“I think I am supposed to ask if you want to hold her. Natalie would ask something like that.”

“Ah.” He frankly couldn’t think of anything worse. He doesn’t kiss babies. He’ll leave that to Captain America, he seems like the type. And heaven forbid he makes the Black Widow’s kid cry. “I don’t like being handed things.”

“My child is not a thing, Stark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cerusee asked for more and who am I to deny people who make effort to comment. Commenters are fantastic peoples. Comment and win a prize. So this ones for you Cerusee.


	3. Dr Bruce Banner

“Not Hydra,” the sharp eyed, familiar looking man behind Tony says as he enters the room.

“Bruce, you remember Agents Barton and Romanoff,” Tony says ignoring the comment, strutting over to the desk to scan Bruce’s notes. It took all of 3 minutes in Tony Stark’s company to realize the man speed reads upside down and has no sense of personal boundaries.

“Natasha and, ah, Agent Barton. Nice to see you both again?” Bruce asks unsure if the arrival the SHIELD agents actually heralds a ‘nice time’.

“Not agents anymore Dr Banner and as Hawkeye here was saying, not Hydra,” Natasha says smiling softly. Bruce removes his glasses. Natasha is holding a child to her chest, newborn between one and two months old if size is anything to go by.

“Glad to hear it,” he says knowing that too sounds like a question.

“Nice work on that equation. Have you thought about how it would work in 5 dimensional… oh right… Barton, Romanoff and baby Barton Romanoff, or is that Romanoff Barton? Just Barton? Just Romanoff? Rushman?” By the daggers Romanoff’s eyes shoot him Bruce assumes that the Rushman is some kind of dig. He lets it slide. It’s much easier, almost meditative, to let Tony keep talking eventually you get the information you need or find that it was unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

“Elizabeth. Her name is Elizabeth,” says Natasha but directly to Bruce, her green eyes softer when she isn’t speaking to Tony.

“Yeah, they keep insisting on that name,” Tony says offhandedly still reading his notes and scattering his papers in a way that will have him reorganizing for an hour before he can get back to work. “Nikita!” he yells suddenly, “The names you could have gone with!”

The child in Natasha’s arms wriggles, letting out the reed thin cry of discontent instantly recognizable to people used to very young children. Elizabeth, it seemed, was not hungry or tired but rather unimpressed with the world at large.

“Um, Congratulations? I take it Tony is trying to say she’s yours?”

Barton reaches for the infant taking her from her mother’s arms in a clearly practiced manoeuvre before answering, “I think he’s tryin’ to rename her, but, yeah, she’s ours.”

Barton’s voice is low and a little roughened with a faint Midwestern twang but he sounds as if he finds life dryly amusing. It’s not how he’d imagined Barton spoke when Natasha first approached him with a cell phone photo of the tesseract and the practiced lies of a spy. It wasn’t a voice he’d associated with the angry looking security ID shot that flickered on the SHIELD screens when he was, how did they put it, compromised? They’d not spoken during the following battle and if the other guy had memory of the archer he didn’t have access to it.

Barton had looked bruised and, though it was an old term Bruce felt it suited the glazed expression of everyone in that shawarma joint, shell shocked after the battle. Bruce remembered Barton’s leg resting on the back of Natasha’s chair and the abrasions on his shoulders and not much else. Transformations always left him feeling like he’d just woken from a coma.

“I assume this isn’t a social visit then? People who know about my, uh, condition don’t usually bring small, breakable infants around for my blessing?”

Without the child in her arms Natasha’s demeanour shifts and she is business like, her stance widening, her right hand encircling her left wrist, “How much do you know of my history Dr Banner?”

“Bruce please, uh none,” he answers a little warily, watching as Barton circles patting the baby’s back and murmuring what Bruce assumes are soothing words. “I, it’s none of my business.”

“Then you would be one of the few people in the world to believe so.”

“Sometimes the world is wrong Ms Romanoff,” he answers and smiles.

“We need your help Bruce, I am going to have to ask you to read those records.”

“For anything in particular?”

“You were working as a physician? I need to know what was done to me. How it is possible that I have a daughter now. If something further was done to me prior to the fall of SHIELD.”

‘They start that young?’ he’d asked and she’d merely shrugged and said ‘I did.’ How young had she been? How young was she now, she shifted mercurially in the short time he’d known her being too knowing, too damaged and then abruptly naïve and strangely untouched by the world in turns. ‘All the toys’ she’d offered him and had known nothing of the commodore 64, he’d felt so old and so tired. India had kept him busy enough that he hadn’t had to think about that feeling.

“Surely Agent Hill, the former SHIELD Doctors, actual fertility specialists…”

“Doctor, Hydra infested SHIELD,” Barton says from the corner of the room his hands cupping the baby’s head and supporting her bottom. “I was on the run for seven months. I almost didn’t make it back to meet this little girl. If we’re gonna protect her, her existence, it needs to be kept quiet.”

Bruce nods. Seven months on the run? Had he even known that Natasha had been pregnant? And yet in what three or four months this former agent had gone from solider and spy to protective father, to someone who referred to the tiny baby in his arms as a little girl.

Tony smiles when he catches Bruce’s eye, it’s a knowing smile, the kind of smile he gets when he talks about getting the team back together as if they were a band who almost made it big rather than a volatile group of science experiments and necessary evils.

“JARVIS give Dr Banner access to all the SHIELD files on Agent Romanoff, code name Black Widow. You need Barton’s too, Bruce?”

Bruce frowns and nods again. He isn’t entirely sure what he’s looking for or what he will find though he supposes more information rather than less will be helpful.

“I’ll need time to work through this?”

Natasha and Barton respond with identical nods.

“You’ve got it,” Tony says confidently though Bruce has yet to hear Tony say anything without confidence. “In the meantime, full body scans for everyone! Not you Bruce. The big guy in an MRI machine? I’ve seen what happens to your pants.” He laughs at his own joke, clapping his hands like he is providing his own rim shot.

“I’ll do my best Natasha. Mr Barton.” I’m a physicist, he wants to say, I’m really not this kind of doctor.

“Clint, Dr Banner and thank you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow! You guys! Such a response! Glad to see so many of you are caught in the 'Really want to see AOU' 'Really worried my ship is going to be sunk' limbo too. So this chapter is for wildpeace who commented first. I said prizes. I didn't actually expect response, but if you commented on chapter one and two and you message me because you really want a prize I'll do my best to send you a little something in the post. Something Avengery, something linguisticy, something shippy. Commenting deserves rewarding. You are all amazing. I hope you continue to enjoy :). And if you get sad waiting please check out my Business Trilogy, more in keeping with pre Age of Ultron continuity, chock full of angst and love and descriptions of Clint Barton's arms.


	4. Pepper Potts

“Natalie!” Pepper gasps when Tony confesses their presence in the tower. Tony takes the gasp to be of pleasure and so continues nuzzling at her neck. It’s convenient for him that this has been the longest relationship he has managed because on top of the daily calls to action, new and wonderful ways of destroying himself and the teenaged level libido, there is a constant need to combat beard rash. She doubts the women who paraded through his bedroom in years gone past had the patience for that one. “Natalie in the Tower?” she pushes him then, always a little shocked by the flash of a wounded expression.

“Natasha. Romanoff. That’s her real name. Actually, I’m not sure she has a real name. And don’t get me started on what they’ve called the kid.” He keeps tugging her closer on the couch but as much as she loves him its become far too like a needy child tugging on apron strings for her to find it attractive. And now she knows Natalie is living in the Tower!

“Barbara!” he exclaims have given up his pursuit for a moment. “Like Barbara Bach from 'The Spy who loved me'? A little obscure I’ll grant you but Mrs Ringo Starr, now she was a looker.”

“Tony!”

“Nothing compared to you my little CEO,” Tony says but it’s if he knows it won’t work in advance.

“Agh. Tony! One, CEO is not to be used as some belittling pet name. Two, Natalie, I mean Natasha is in the Tower?”

Natalie Rushman from legal. It wasn’t that she had been SHIELD all along. Well, it was that she had been SHIELD all along, but it was also that she had been perfectly designed to seduce and monitor Tony. The lingerie modelling in Japan, the undeniable intelligence, the crisp efficiency. Natalie Rushman had been the better Pepper Potts. When they had thought about how best to monitor the threat that was Iron Man someone had said, we need Pepper Potts but better. Pepper Potts did not enjoy feeling insecure and the knowledge that some shadowy organisation, some redheaded spy had had that conversation made her feel insecure. She was Pepper Potts, how dare they!

“I’m not getting welcome home sex am I?” Tony pouts.

“You’ve been home the entire time. Apparently renting out suites to spies.”

“Funny you should say that,” he says running a hand through his hair.

“Funny?! Anthony Edward Stark!” she yells and he shies from her like a guilty dog faced with a suspicious puddle.

“Spies…” he grins, “Natasha isn’t alone.”

“No? I suppose you’ve rented out rooms to the entirety of SHIELD.”

“I thought you liked SHIELD?” Tony says seemingly shocked.

“I liked Phil,” she says. She fondly remembers the man who initially seemed a pleasant enough bureaucrat for one of the many intelligence organizations buzzing around after Tony returned from Afghanistan. He had fast become one of the few people who understood how equally annoying and endearing Tony Stark really was.

“And you like Hill.”

“She keeps you in your place.”

“Speaking of my place, wanna go back to mine?” he says and wiggles his eyebrow suggestively. She’d been excited to see him again when she’d left Tokyo but now she remembers why she schedules in time for Tony sized bombshells and the aftermath while planning her days.

“ _Really?!”_ she huffs.

“Fine. Romanoff showed up on the doorstep three nights ago. Woke me up from a deep sleep!”

“JARVIS?” she asks politely.

“Sir was in his workshop ma’am.”

“Traitor!” Tony exclaims before continuing, “With a Hawkeye and a baby in tow.”

“A baby, why would a SHIELD agent have a baby?”

Tony taps his nose twice, leaning back against the arm of the sofa casually. “They keep telling me they aren’t SHIELD agents anymore and apparently they were really putting the team into strike team delta.”

“Agent Romanoff has a baby?” Try as she might she can’t imagine Natalie or the cat suited Agent Romanoff with a baby, both versions of the woman she only imagines holding an infant at arm’s length and looking concerned or faintly disgusted.

“And a Hawkeye.”

“And they are living here?”

“I had to take them in Pep, they were like lost lambs…” Tony says his voice taking on a whining quality, “deadly lost lambs,” he allows. Pepper stands straightening the line of her suit. “Pep? Pep? Where are you going?”

“Nikita, is a male name,” Natasha’s voice calls out as the elevator door opens, it’s just a fraction less higher pitch than Pepper remembers it, a bit more like the voice she used to put an end to Justin Hammer’s misogynistic bullshit.

As Pepper rounds the corner, towards the suites open plan kitchen, a male voice responds, it’s warm and friendly and not quite what she was thinking for a man who went by the name of Hawkeye, “Not in Belgium. Tasha, I just said it was cute. I’m not letting Tony Stark rename our baby.” His voice trails off as she comes into view and she can see the man return a carving knife into the expensive Danish Modern knife block.

“Ms Potts,” he nods, standing a little taller something reminiscent of coming to attention.

“So it’s true?” she says and then realizes she has no idea what she intended to say once she’d confirmed that ‘Natalie’ had taken up residence. “I. I came down to welcome you both to the Tower. You must be Hawkeye.”

“Clint. Clint Barton, Ma’am.” The Ma’am sounds a little forced as though it’s not his usual habit despite the farm boy look to his attire and the military posture.

“Mr Barton, Pepper Potts. You were involved with the Chitauri invasion?” He’s the agent with the bow and arrows, now the nickname makes sense.

“Yes. Yes Ma’am,” he nods and then bellows with an apologetic grin, “Natasha!” He doesn’t take his eyes off her and Pepper finds it odd that he’s acting so deferential, most people meeting her as Tony’s girlfriend and not as the CEO of Stark Industries fail to defer until she’s put them firmly in their places. This man has to be at least her age and yet he stands there as if she is his superior officer.

“Pepper,” Natasha says in the doorway. She’s not wearing a SHIELD cat suit or the sharp business suits Natalie wore and Pepper suddenly realizes that ‘Natalie’s’ attire had been a subtle mirror to her own, another way to get her to trust the young agent.

“Natalie, I mean, it’s Natasha now isn’t it.”

“Yes,” Natasha answers her right hand coming up to grip her left wrist.

“I hear congratulations are in order.”

“Thank you,” the man known as Hawkeye offers when Natasha fails to say anything.

Natasha blinks twice at the man’s thanks and then as if rousing herself from a dream she asks, “Would you like to see her?”

“A girl?”

“Elizabeth. Though your, um, Tony wants to call her something else,” Hawkeye says hurriedly, clearly compensating for his partner’s sudden silence.

“It’s a pretty name,” Pepper says smiling at the archer.

“Thank you,” Natasha says and Pepper would like to believe it’s as genuine as the way she makes it sound.

“Yes.”

“Yes?” Natasha echoes.

“I’d like to see her,” Pepper says and it’s as if Natasha’s whole body says an unspoken ‘Oh’. Natasha never apologized for the Natalie misdirection. Natasha had probably never had to say she was sorry for any of the things she had done as an agent in the field, the people she’d lied to were either dead or saved when she moved on. Pepper had believed Natasha hadn’t thought her lies had been wrong and that lying to her had been the right thing to do. There was something in the way she held herself now, the loose fitting clothes, the lack of quick and appropriate responses that makes Pepper question that assumption now.

“She’s through here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this one goes out to Jencat the first one to comment on the last chapter. I said Prizes and then I failed to give you a way of messaging so if you commented on one of the last chapters and you would like a small but personal prize email me at wildechilde1979@gmail.com and you get a prize, you get a prize etc :). Nothing huge I'm afraid but I do love gift giving so why the hell not. 
> 
> Thank you to everyone one who has commented and kudosed so far.
> 
> There will be a Maria chapter. Promise. I don't think it is that they trust Bruce more than Maria just that they aren't sure where her loyalties lie, she has always been a defender of SHIELD and the hierarchy after all and Clint and Natasha have trust issues up the wahzoo.
> 
> Also Pepper doesn't hate Natasha for trying to seduce Tony. It's more complicated than that full of intangible things about trust and friendship and believing you have found a kindred spirit.


	5. Natasha Romanoff

She opens her eyes and takes stock of her surroundings silently. He is still in the bed and his heavy arms are draped around her, one spread high to hold her wrist. Try as she might she often wakes to find her arm reaching above her as if tethered to the bed frame. His right hand has inched beneath her t-shirt and is warm against her skin. The skin and muscles of her abdomen are no longer as tight as they once were though he gives no indication that he knows this. Her healing is faster than most and she has done her best to retain the fitness required to fight but she is all too aware of the changes the child has wrought.

Large swaths of the room have remained untouched by them, the large bed moved closer to the ensuite and the crib wedged between them. She had seen the way Pepper’s gaze had stuttered over the transformation of the room before catching on Elizabeth and demonstrating how genteel pretence could be raised to an art form.

The little girl for whom all this was done is a natural, as Clint puts it, enamouring all she has met with her large curious eyes. Clint’s eyes, she always says, but she uses them like you, he’d say.

They curve like petals round seeds, she curves too, curled like she is still in the womb. Eyes tightly closed and a small fist pushed to her toothless mouth. Such a small, helpless thing and yet the world pivots for her.

Maybe they have slept for two hours like this.

Then the panic starts. Natasha had slept too heavily. She remembers nothing. Clint beside her is also asleep. Anything, anyone could have happened to her child.

“Hey,” he says groggily, his hand closed around her wrist comes free to scrub at his face, “What’s wrong?”

“We slept.” His hand is still beneath her shirt, it draws her closer.

“Yeah, so did she,” he says, warm breath in her ear, “You want something to eat? No, okay, not the right thing to say.” That hand reading, through callouses and skin, her heart beating.

“She could have… anything could have happened.”

“Tasha, hey, listen to me.” She won’t take her eyes from the baby as he talks. He sits as she sit and scoops the sleeping infant from the bed and into her chest. “You would have woken up the second anyone entered this apartment. Hell, I pulled a kitchen knife on Stark’s girlfriend slash CEO yesterday.”

“You don’t know that!”

It was a large suite but they had by silent, mutual agreement set it up like a safe house. Everything they needed was far from the large windows that opened the apartment to the New York skyline. In the five days they’d been there they had hugged the walls, kept everything packed, ready to flee at a moment’s notice. They’d used two square feet of the large kitchen, one shelf of the refrigerator, only the ensuite bathroom, the television that took up most of an entire wall remained resolutely switched off. In the bedroom the still unused crib was hidden between the bed and the en suite and away from the windows permanently shrouded by the rich curtains.

If need be you could make a leap from the bed, over the crib and barricade yourself and an infant in the free standing tub. A quiver of arrows had taken up residence by the basin. The second drawer down held two loaded glocks wrapped in soft black felt. A bathroom is a terrible place to keep weapons, humidity destroys, but they had stored weapons in worse places. Perhaps this was why it felt so unhinged to sit in Tony Stark’s abject luxury and behave as if it was a safe house in Venezuela.

“Sure I do,” he says as if he too realizes the insanity. “JARVIS?”

“Mr Barton, Sir?”

“Did anyone approach this apartment in the last two hours?”

“No Sir, the last recorded entry to this floor of the Tower was at 16:42 hours by Ms Romanoff.”

“Thanks JARVIS.” Clint watches her as he thanks the unseen butler. She rises from the bed.

“Artificial intelligence systems can be circumvented,” she says as she leaves.

“Natasha,” he says following, “ _you_ can’t be, even this tired. You pulled a gun on me for taking her out of the room remember? I’ve seen you take down three trained agents while heavily drugged. I mean, elephant tranquilizer drugged. SHIELD medical flinched every time they had to put you under.”

“I need to protect her,” she says stopping short.

“Okay. Okay,” he approaches her like he has in the past when anaesthesia has made it harder to tell reality from fiction, when drugs make her feel like her mind is being hollowed from the inside out. Hands open and up, hey Romanoff, it’s Hawkeye. We good? She’s broken his nose when he’s come too close too quickly. He’s a fast learner, he never did it again. “We’ll sleep in shifts. Like an op.”

“An Op?” she says frustrated that he is treating her like she is compromised.     

“Yeah, you trust me right?” he asks bending at the knees to look straight into her eyes. They are her daughter’s eyes that he looks at her with.

“Yes.”                                                                                                         

“Good,” he says his hands coming up to hold her shoulders. Her partner’s hands, she reminds herself. “She’s mine too, I’m not going to let anything happen to her.”

“I know.”

Clint smiles sadly, “I miss you Tasha. I love her more than I even thought possible but God I miss you. If Banner and Stark, if they find miracle and not plot… can we try being a family.”

“A family?”

“Yeah, you know, a Mom and Dad and not protective custody,” he sighs like he is fighting a losing battle and then more softly he adds “I like falling asleep with you.” He smiles again and looking lost shrugs before bending once to kiss Elizabeth’s brow. He turns towards the refrigerator.

“Clint,” she says and waits for him to respond knowing that even with the aids a clear line of sight is preferable.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Maybe _we_ could learn?”

“I will try,” she agrees and he moves quickly, his large hands cupping her cheeks and bring her lips to his. She can feel the way his mouth curves into a grin against hers. He is careful of the child between them but she can feel the way he is holding back, the muscles in his arms contracted against his desire to pull her closer. He turns his head kissing her once on the cheek before returning to the kitchen.

She paces as he begins to fill the sink with hot water. Though she is far against the wall she can see the lights of New York City begin to flicker and brighten, it’s the kind of sightlines that Clint would kill for in any other situation.

“You heard from Rogers?” he asks eventually over the clatter of baby bottles and pacifiers.

“He checks in from time to time. Not since the birth. Why?”

“You didn’t tell him about her, about us, did you?”

“It was safer,” she admits and wonders if this worries Clint now that there are no regulations to be broken.

“Mmm, just lately every second word outta my mouth is, ‘Not Hydra’ and ‘Me and the Black Widow made a kid’.”

“And if Steve knew?” she asks frowning.

“Then I could menace him a little about kissing you,” he grins over his shoulder at her.

“You want to threaten Captain America?”

“Nah, just going a little stir crazy. Seems like the kind of guy who’d get worked up about making out with another guy’s girl.”

“I thought ‘Natasha isn’t anyone’s Mr Stark’,” she says raising an eyebrow.

“I know that, you know that, Captain America’s 1940’s values might not know that.”

“How do you know his 1940’s values won’t menace you about getting a girl pregnant and disappearing for seven months?” Clint’s mouth drops open slightly as though he has not considered this possibility.

“Right…. So back to ‘Hi, Clint Barton. Not Hydra’.”

“I’d stick with the tried and tested, Barton,” she answers acerbically.

Clint laughs. It’s a good laugh, open and inclusive with a complete absence of cynicism. She missed that laugh.

Elizabeth begins to squirm, she holds her breath and then lets out a long, high wail.

“Oh little girl! Did we wake you?” Clint asks coming closer, “Nope, nope. That was not me. That was you.” To Natasha he only asks, “How does one small baby make such a God awful smell?”

“Lizzie, Lizzie,” he sings trying to catch the little girl’s eye as she rubs her face unhappily against Natasha’s sternum, “I have fallen into dumpsters that smelled better than you.” Despite the smell and the wailing he reaches for her, “I’ll take first watch, go back to sleep. She won’t leave my side.” He always reaches for her.

He is changing her diaper in the en suite as Natasha falls asleep. His rich voice low as he hums and occasionally sings lyrics from an unfamiliar song. “But as long as there are stars above you, you never need to doubt it, I’ll make you so sure about it, God only knows what I’d be without you.”  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry in the delay for this chapter, we had a huge storm here and power, phone towers and the like were out for two days. I didn't get swept off the road to drown though so being held up at home reading by candle light and moving all of my belongings to the tops of counters wasn't so bad. As always if you comment you can have a prize. Seriously. I am very willing to send prizes.
> 
> Oh and this chapter goes out to Ann, the very first person to comment on the last chapter. Thanks Ann. You rock!


	6. Steve Rogers

When Maria Hill welcomed him to Stark, no, Avengers Tower, he hadn’t expected this. It’s his apartment. He corrects himself mid thought. It’s what was left of his apartment in DC, salvaged and replaced in a much larger suite. It’s too much. It’s a preposterous show of wealth, it's grandstanding and more than a little creepy. What is with these people that they keep thinking he’ll flip his lid if he isn’t surrounded by 1940’s tchotchkes?

He just smiled politely and let her leave. Hill is, thankfully, serious and busy enough that she doesn’t fuss like the other people he’s been dealing with. Peggy would have approved, definitely not some silly dame playing dress up in a uniform til the boys get home.

He’s going to have to thank Stark too. He’s going to have to be convincing. It isn’t that Tony is trying to shove his wealth and influence down his throat, he knows that… he’s a bit too much like Howard, it’s thoughtlessness really, he can’t help wondering who the woman that got Howard to hang it up was and why she didn’t teach her son that sometimes less is more.

He needs to get his own place in Brooklyn. If he can afford his own place in Brooklyn.

He does realize he is standing in the middle of a shiny wooden room hoping that if he doesn’t touch anything all this will turn out to be a dream. He knows that. He knows that he does that a lot now. Sam's been laughing at him, apparently whenever something too new, too flashy, too 21st century is put in front of him he closes his eyes. Sam says no amount of ‘there’s no place like homing’ is gonna make it go away.

He just thought… he thought this time when he got back to New York he’d at least have Bucky with him. Sam is still on the hunt at least. Sam has contacts through the Veterans and old soldiers recognize their own, young soldiers too and there are a lot more of them again these days, just not the ones Steve would know.

The doorbell rings.

Don’t get him started on the pointlessness of a door bell when the whole floor is apparently his. He answers it anyway. A distraction would be good. He rest his duffel bag against the bookshelf.

“Natasha!” he says.

“Hey Cap, just came to make sure you hadn’t bought the farm yet?”

“’Cause I’m so old,” he says monotonously.

“’Cause you’re so old,” she agrees grinning, for a moment he half expects her to punch his shoulder playfully. Her hair is longer but pulled back and twisted down her neck.          

“Your material needs work.”

“I’ve been a little busy.” Her voice is a little huskier than usual as if she’s been yelling or sleeping less. Her eyes scan the room behind him and she raises an eyebrow.

“Figuring out a new cover?”

She smiles enigmatically but doesn’t answer, “You got a moment?” she asks instead.

“Yeah, why not. Not a date, right?”

“It’s like you still don’t trust me,” she says brightly as he pulls the door shut behind them. Maybe when he gets back it won’t be so… CAPTAIN AMERICA in there.

Natasha looks different. It isn't just that her hair has changed or her clothing, there is something less arch in the way she holds herself and the edge has come away from her smiles. She told him she wasn't all things to all people and he tries not to wonder who she is today, whose Natasha she is, after all, she is his friend.

He is about to ask why she is here in New York when the elevator door opens. She glances up at him something measuring in her gaze.

"Steve," she says opening the door, "You remember Hawkeye?"

Agent Barton, or rather former Agent Barton is in the kitchen with his back to them as they enter. He turns with one hand holding a bottle of orange juice and, like a tiny football, a small baby wedged between his body and other hand.

Steve looks at Natasha as Barton says, "Nice to see you again Captain."

Natasha gives a little encouraging nod as if she believes it's her duty to help him make friends.

"Barton, I. You too?" he says unable to keep the question out of his voice or his eyes off the baby in Barton's arms.

"Clint, call me Clint. Oh yeah. Not Hydra. Hill did tests and everything," Barton says as if the baby in his arms is as commonplace as the orange juice he puts down on the counter. The baby stares transfixed by the new face and voice, mouthing reflexively at the leather wrist band on Barton's left arm.

And then Steve remembers.

"The arrow!" He hits his forehead with frustration.

"Impressive, for an old guy, " Natasha concedes beside him, "I had you down for a few more questions first."

"The arrow?" Barton asks.

"Necklace. No uniform on the run." She shrugs, she is quicker with him, talking like they have a secret code. No, not a code, a shared history, one she doesn't have to make up.

"Arrow necklace. You getting sentimental Romanoff?"

"Hormones," she answers and Barton grins. Steve's seen that smile before, she'd whispered something in Central Park and the stone faced archer had grinned just like that. Free and easy.

Steve closes his eyes, he knows Sam would laugh at him but dammit he would be just as blindsided by Romanoff and Barton and...

"So the baby is yours?" he says quietly.

"Little girl, almost six weeks."

"Elizabeth," Natasha says.

"Six weeks. When you were shot? The Lumerian Star?"

"Quicker with the math too. Barton took twice as long."

Barton looks aghast at Natasha before looking down at the baby, "But your daddy was playing with a handicap, wasn't he Lizzie Bee. Your Mama doesn't play fair."

"She is a fighter," Natasha offers too lightly for Steve's liking.

"Just like her mom," Barton says and Steve wants to shake them both until they stop behaving as if life was this unimportant.

Natasha seems to recognize this. "Would you like to hold her?"

Steve feels himself blanch.

"Tash, give the guy a second. He looks like he's gonna faint."

"You kissed me!?" Steve finally exclaims unable to think of anything else.

"Ha!" Barton laughs suddenly, "Pay up, Tash. 40's morals. Told you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this one goes out to Fury_Natalia who was the first new person to comment on the last chapter. Though, thank you again Ann and Jencat for all the support. You guys so rock. Also it's a Cap chapter for everyone who wanted to know what Cap would think. (I know you guys are just a little bit like Tony, all playing it cool but actually really concerned with what Captain America thinks) It's the first time I've ever written from his perspective so I hope I've got the voice down. 
> 
> Natalia, the baby is Clint's its just a question of how much, if any role Hydra had in Natasha (a canonically infertile character) becoming pregnant. Hope that helps with that. 
> 
> Now I'm going back to my world where Blackhawk never gets sunk or jossed. How do I insert Pirates of the Caribbean 'Stop blowing holes in my ship' gif here?


	7. Maria Hill

“I hope you don’t mind that I asked Maria to be here today? She’s been helping me track each of the medical staff you came across in your time at SHIELD, Agent, sorry, Natasha.”

Doctor Banner welcomes Barton and Romanoff to the labs as though her presence will cause some kind of explosion. Stark has obviously told him of the argument that occurred around the arrival of the two assassins at the tower. It’s ridiculous. They are professionals.

“Helping?” Barton says and smirks like he doesn’t believe a word of it. Well then, _she_ is a professional.

“Yes, helping. I am not looking for the infant to be a Hydra plan any more than…”

“Her name is Elizabeth,” Romanoff cuts her off, handing the infant behind her to Barton. Of course they were sleeping together.

“And I’m sure she’s an ideal baby. Just because you two felt regulations were beneath you, doesn’t mean that they existed without reason.”

“Oh, I know the reasons,” Romanoff says darkly. Maria feels it as if it were a slap in the face. Honestly, she gave her whole life in service of the ideals SHIELD stood for, how dare they?!

Barton was bad enough, playing at being Han Solo, despite 50 other recruits with higher education and more than three years of military service. A jumped up, circus trained, criminal marksman with an attitude that had Hill shunting him from S.O to S.O. But Fury had faith in him and Hill had faith in Fury. And then instead of terminating the Black Widow threat he brings her home like a stray. Coulson always had much more patience for that kind of disregard for orders.

It isn’t that Romanoff hasn’t been an effective Agent. She was easier to oversee than Barton any day of the week. Paper work always handed in on time, orders carried out to the letter, a complete lack of farcical commentary down the comms like you got when Hawkeye was in the field. And it wasn’t that Strike Team Delta wasn’t the best team they’d ever put into the field.

They had regulations for a reason.

 _She_ wasn’t Hydra. You didn’t have to be loose cannons with death wishes to not be Hydra.

“And what was your plan Romanoff, put the kid in a Baby Bjorn and try to seduce a despot like she wasn’t there?” she says.

Romanoff leans down over the bench Maria is seated at and says quietly as if she wants Maria to have to lean in to hear it, “You have never trusted me.” Maria swears she can hear something Russian in her intonation.

Romanoff has had this chip on her shoulder ever since she was excluded from the circle of ‘need to know’ about Fury.

“I trusted you to do your job. Look where that got us,” Maria says keeping her voice level and gesturing to the infant in Barton’s arms.

“I trusted _you_ to do _your_ job. Look where _it_ got us,” Romanoff snaps back.

“Maybe this wasn’t a good idea?” Banner is saying to Stark next to her. Maria only looks away from Romanoff and her flashing green eyes, Romanoff and her righteous indignation.

“You kidding? I was just wondering how I could get 50 pounds of Jello in here before they make up,” Stark replies gleefully.

“Hey!” Barton yells from across the room, Romanoff stands up smartly and for a second Hill can see why Fury always said ‘Natural Leadership Skills’

“I, for one, came down here to find out what Doctor Banner knows. And Hill, I will be wearing the Baby Bjorn while Natasha seduces, obviously.” And then Barton, as predictable as mullets at NASCAR, decimates any impression he might have given of being an actual adult.

Maria refuses to answer, Stark is fiddling with a holographic display and may, for all she knows, be designing a tactical Baby Bjorn. Banner looks stunned.

“Um, Natasha you were shot five years ago in Odessa?”

“Texas?” Stark pipes up.

“Ukraine,” Natasha turns her smile to the doctor, ignoring Stark, “Gut wound. Part of the job,” she finishes pointedly.

“The following surgery repaired the damage done by the bullet but the surgeon,” Banner sifts through his notes, a vivid contrast to Stark’s holograms, “a Doctor Gutierrez out of the base in Bonn, Germany,” he looks to Hill for confirmation, she nods and he carries on, “thought healing would be more effective if he removed a large amount of scar tissue he found in your pelvic cavity.”

“Gutierrez is not Hydra,” Maria adds to Banner’s briefing.

“He was assisted by anaesthesiologist, Dr Brakenburg and another surgeon Dr Tran as well as two theatre nurses, Brown and Carr.”

“We can account for all except Tran,” Maria says, pulling up the personnel file for Lee Tran on the Stark issued tablet in front of her. Barton circles closer, shifting the infant as he studies the details.

“Tran may be Hydra?” he asks.

“Not necessarily,” she says, “Tran was at the Treehouse when the Hydra codes went out. Tran was killed in the ensuing action. I can’t exclude that she was Hydra nor that she was a loyal SHIELD Agent.”

“Where does that leave us?” Natasha asks.

“Are you familiar with Ockham’s Razor?” Banner says smiling, Hill assumes he means it to be reassuring but from where she sits the doctor’s smiles always look nervous, skittish even.

“Plurality must never be posited without necessity,” Barton offers, weaving in and out of the floating displays that Stark continues to play with, in the same way someone might click a pen or doodle compulsively.

“Yes. Yes that’s it exactly,” Banner adjusts his glasses as he looks up at the archer.

“Don’t look so shocked Doc. I admit she’s usually the brains of the outfit but I’m not an idiot.”

“I never…” Banner stutters.

“He’s messing with you, Bruce,” Natasha says kindly. She doesn’t turn to look at Barton as she speaks but he nods along happily agreeing with her every word, “He’s been cooped up too long. First, he gets sarcastic and then arrow holes start appearing in the walls.”

“So many safe houses, so many arrow holes,” Maria says recollecting the many, many requests for repairs that have come about as the result of a bored Agent Barton. It might have been possible that the reason they had moved Strike Team Delta to a no extraction policy was, in some small way, because it kept Barton busy. Of course, Agent Romanoff was probably doing that for them all along.

“Right... as I was saying with the surgery it may have become possible for you to conceive naturally. The original sterilization, the tubal ligation is 99% effective in the first year but after that…” Banner’s voice trails off before he finds another notation, “The Red Room appeared dependent on the ligation and the scar tissue… a very small possibility, especially considering SHIELD protocol for birth control.”

“But good ol’ William of Ockham,” Stark interrupts, despite appearances to the contrary, Maria concedes, it might be possible that he has been paying attention to the conversation the entire time. “It’s more likely that the kid was a slip through the cracks than Hydra planned for you to get shot, planned for the good doctor Guttierrez to take out scar tissue, planned for you to be playing arrow and quiver with Hawkeye here and planned for your implant to fail.”

“Too many assumptions,” Maria sums up.

“Too many chances for the plan to fail. After all it isn’t like SHIELD knew of your relationship with Barton,” Banner says looking to Maria who shakes her head ruefully.

“And the kid is Barton’s,” Stark says, flicking a layout of maternal and paternal DNA so that it abruptly takes up half a wall, “I didn’t take all that blood for shits and giggles.”

“You’re saying it was just dumb luck Doc?” Barton says a little hopefully.              

“No. Natasha you are different. The Red Room didn’t just train you to become the perfect assassin, they made other alterations. Healing, aging, your physical abilities, you are aware of these differences.”

The soft smile Natasha has kept on her face, for the benefit of Banner Maria assumes, vanishes. “They tried to replicate Operation Rebirth, they failed.”

“Yes,” Banner says gently, “but it may be that your heightened hormonal cycle is not effected by standard birth control.”

Maria considers this for a moment and then considers the horrifying possibility of the many more baby Bartons that could have been.

“Elizabeth is healthy?” Natasha says, taking this in, “Nothing was done to her?”

“Elizabeth is perfectly healthy. As far as I can tell her existence has more to do with a convergence of rare and unexpected events than the intervention of science itself.” Natasha looks unnaturally stunned but behind her, with the infant in his arms, Barton is beaming.

“But Natasha and Clint,” Banner continues, “you should know it may be many years before we know the full effects of Natasha’s altered biology on her.”

“They didn’t change her DNA right? She shouldn’t have inherited anything?” Barton says, his grin disappearing with new concerns.

“No, Natasha’s DNA remains her own, just with certain things ‘switched on’ and others ‘switched off’. However, there is much we don’t know about epigenetics and at very least Natasha was the environment that Elizabeth’s DNA blueprint was put into effect in.”

“So one morning Avengers Tower _could_ wake up to an Agent Bartoff!” Stark says.

“I think that’s highly unlikely,” Banner says hurriedly though he smiles as if he enjoys Stark’s ludicrous asides, “I suspect her physical and mental aptitudes will have more to do with the natural outcome of having two healthy, physically talented parents and growing up in an environment that encourages such pursuits.”

Barton reaches out for Romanoff’s hand and when she reaches back for him Maria feels like she shouldn’t be watching.

How did she miss it? Of course, they were fucking.

“We should monitor her,” she says to Banner.       

“Hill,” Barton says, his tone a threat.

“No, Maria is right,” Banner says and Maria is strangely grateful. It isn’t that she couldn’t hold her own against Barton, it’s that without SHIELD there have been very few people who have had her back of late. “I think we should monitor her aging, healing, reactions to stress as she grows. It won’t appear to be anything other than a normal doctor’s visit.”

Natasha is holding on to the edge of the laboratory bench like she is afraid to let go. “Natasha,” the doctor continues, “She is your baby, all of her. She is here because of you and Clint alone.”

“Because Barton couldn’t keep it in his pants,” Maria mutters but no one seems to hear her.

“Mostly Tash, I’m pretty much a glorified sperm donor, she worked the miracles.”

“Don’t know Barton, seems like you worked a miracle too, aren’t all Black Widow’s sperm donors dead before the egg hatches?” Stark says, slapping Barton on the back.

The room goes quiet. Natasha looks up from the bench and smiles too sharply for it to be anything but a warning.

Barton looks down at his daughter and in a stage whisper announces, “And Lizzie Bee, this is when we leave so your mama can kill Uncle Tony in peace.”

He leaves with the infant to the accompaniment of “Uncle?”

“Uncle?!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter goes out to tiziara who was the first to comment on the last chapter.  
> I hope the story continues to be a balm for those who have seen AOU and feel lost. 
> 
> Thank you all for your comments and kudos. Though Starbucks doesn't follow the continuity of my Business Trilogy in many parts exactly if you wanted to read more about this Clint and Natasha and how they might have got together please give it a read. I'd love to hear your thoughts.


	8. Clint Barton

“Okay, baby Hawk, you ready?” he says, sitting her upright in the baby carrier so she can see. She follows him with her eyes now, looks for him with wobbly head muscles when she hears his voice. “You focused? ‘Cause you gotta focus if ya never gonna miss,” he touches the tip of her nose with his gloved finger, enjoying the way she becomes crossed eyed for a split second trying to bring his fingertip into focus before the untrained muscles give up in the attempt.

He heads to the shooting line, “Ready?” he asks again and draws, his gloved hand grazes softly at his anchor point, “The wire tenses. Your back muscles tighten and lock. Slow your breathing. Exhale, relax your hand.”

“Woooo hooo!” he says as the arrow head imbeds itself with a pleasing thunk. She coos, an echo of his hoot. “You see that kiddo! Futzing bullseye.” He’s been trying to tone down the language, a little bit because he doesn’t want her first words to be ‘motherfucking Stark’ and a bit more because Steve winces just slightly every time he swears.

“I missed that feeling,” he says, tickling her foot where she has managed to work yet another sock off her toes. “Now to do it, oh I dunno, a couple thousand more times.”

“You think the range is the best place for a baby, Hawkeye?” she says leaning against the entrance like a 1950’s movie star. If she crawled her hand up, held it against the frame above her head and pulled out a long stemmed cigarette she wouldn’t look any less out of place.

Tony came after him when he left the lab, in his hand one of those terrible green lava lamp drinks and jogging like he was actually worried Natasha might kill him. ‘Hey Hawkeye, not for nothing, in fact so you don’t put arrow holes in my walls, so, you know, the opposite of nothing, anyway, there’s a shooting range two floors down from your suite. Put it in after Lokifest ’12. Set it up for the middle ages too just in case we needed you again. Just ask Jarvis. You think I can go back to my lab now?’

“This baby?” he says, grinning at the butterball he calls his daughter, “This amazing baby Hawk, sure I do.”

“Baby Hawk?” she says and he knows it’s been a while but it is possible for her to sound something other than sultry, right? “And how do you know she isn’t a baby spider?”

“Nah, she’s a baby bird aren’t you Lizzie Bee?” The girl in question responds with a squeal, kicking her feet as if she understands every word. God he hopes she doesn’t understand every word. “All fluffy and constantly wanting to be fed.”

“And if you miss?” Natasha frowns and he can’t help but follow the way her lips part.

“I don’t miss, baby,” he slings his bow over his shoulder, “You gotta know that.”

“You better be calling the actual infant, baby, and not me Mister Barton,” she says coming close enough to touch. She isn’t wearing perfume, hasn’t worn anything but the residual smell of soap and baby on her skin since her found her again. She smells amazing, human, female, real.

He throws his head to the side to look at her like she’s in his sights, “Yes Ma’am,” he chuckles.

“I’m taking my baby back.”

“What? No!” he says “Tasha, we just got started. She likes it here. Anyway, it’s my watch didn’t you want a shower or some sleep or something?”

Those big, blue eyes are fixed on him as Natasha unbuckles the baby from the carrier. She shoves her fingers into her mouth as she comes to rest on her mother’s shoulder. He’s smitten with her, her gummy, squishy, big eyed ways, has been since the moment she first cried in Natasha’s arms. Now he knows, really knows, giants floating DNA helixes and Dr Banner pencil scratches knows, she is his… he’s filled with a kind of manic energy to show her everything.

“I’m done taking shifts,” Natasha says.

“Hmm? What’s that mean when it’s at home then?” he asks, scratching absently at the stubble on his chin.

Natasha turns, flashing a sympathetic smile, “I miss falling asleep with you, bird brain”

He smirks, “Really? Anything else you miss?”

“Don’t push your luck,” she says pressing her hand into his chest. He glances down and before she has a chance to take her hand away again he reaches up and takes it.

“Dunno Red, feels like I’ve been on a hot streak of late,” he says, tangling his gloved hand in hers. She stares for a moment at their hands, black glove and tanned, calloused skin against her almost impossibly cream colored fingers.

“Да́льше с глаз -- бли́же к се́рдцу, моя милая девочка,” she whispers to her daughter. He loves the way her voice sounds when she whispers Russian even though he can’t decipher the words, it sounds like a storm coming in from the sea, a rising, dangerous wind.                                                              

Natasha blinks, pulling her hand back like she knows they are walking the very edge of something, like she knows one word could topple them either way, “I think you’re right, she does like it down here.”          

“She likes the fletching and the bullseyes.”

“Do you think Uncle Tony will make us baby sized sound proof head phones?” she asks the baby, then, “Maybe she’d like bullets too,” she grins up at him wickedly.

“Uncle Tony?” he says trying not to be side tracked by the sudden urge to push her up against the wall and run his hands all over her body, “Right, hold still!” he orders, “I need to check you for possible life model decoy.”

She rolls her eyes, “He seemed more annoyed by it than me.” She slips past him, talking brightly to the baby in her arms, “Shall we go and see? Did Daddy make his shot?”

One day, he thinks, Daddy is going to feel normal. One day, it won’t feel like he’s had the wind knocked out of him.

“Don’t you listen to her Lizzie Bee, your Daddy never misses,” he hollers as Natasha makes her way down to the butts.

“She does like the fletchings,” Natasha calls back when the little girl reaches out and grasps the colored feathers at the end of the arrow.

“Yeah,” he says, unhooking his quiver from his hip, “She’s good at the hold, not so much on the release yet.”

When she returns, placing Elizabeth back in her carrier, Natasha sighs, “The hold is the harder.”

“Is it?” he asks.

“[Much](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u2oQrjL78M) easier to let go than to fight for it.”

“Nah, they’re both hard,” he says softly. “The trick is learning when to hold on and when to let go.”

She steps closer and he stills, letting her decided how far she wants to take this. He’s always done this, fallen back, let her choose, far too often the choice has been so far from her reach. With one fingertip she traces the outline of a vein in his forearm. He wishes she would look up, even for a second. He thinks, if she did, he might be able to read what she wants in her eyes.

“You gonna loose some arrows, hot shot?”

“I thought we were done here,” he says, his own voice sounding shrapnel shredded in his ears. Her fingertips are resting on his arm. Her neck exposed as the waves of red curls sweep across her other shoulder.

She takes a deep breath before she answers, “She likes it here.”

He knows that isn’t all she wants to say, knows it in his bones.  

“You gonna to fight or let go, Natasha?” he asks. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Да́льше с глаз -- бли́же к се́рдцу, моя милая девочка - Tran lit [ further from eye --- closer to heart, my sweet girl]  
> Tran gloss Absence make the heart grow fonder, my sweet girl
> 
> This chapter is for Beneathground who was first to comment on the Maria Hill chapter. Thanks Beneathground!
> 
> Was going to write a whole chapter from the perspective of Groot next... it went "I am Groot. I am Groot. I am Groot. I am Groot. I am Groot. I am Groot. I am Groot. I am Groot. I am Groot. I am Groot. I am Groot. I am Groot. I am Groot."  
> But you guys deserve better, so taking advice on whose perspective you want the next chapter to be from. 
> 
> Prizes to anyone who wants one just send me an email.


	9. Clint Barton wants you to shut the fuck up

Stark’s roof was a damn sight more dramatic than the one he had in Bed Stuy but he couldn’t just stand on the edge and pretend there was no wall below him like he could on his old apartment building. No, getting right to edge was going to take a bit more effort up here. This place had the markings of health and safety, someone with a passing knowledge of what it was like to be _not_ fucking reckless, this place had the fingerprints of Virginia ‘Pepper’ Potts.

He just needed distance. Maybe a cold shower. Maybe several cold showers.

The breeze picks up, rifling through his hair like a thief looking for jewellery. He’s glad she cut it for him before they left. It’s short but not military short, plenty of room for rifling.

He’ll go back. There is no doubt in his mind, he’ll be back down in the giant rooms they share pretending nothing hurts in five, maybe ten minutes. Maybe he’ll wait until the sun goes down.

Sometimes he wants to tell her to stop being so honest. He doesn’t really want that from her and he doesn’t really want be the kind of person who would ask her to do that. She’d do it too, become whatever he asked her to become. Too many changes have happened in the last, in the last year, for her not to fall back on that old survival instinct, she had many names, she was a shadow.

Just once he’d like to ask her if she’s gonna break his stupid heart and have her say the pleasant lie. The ‘I don’t know’ rings true but it stings every fucking time. And he knows she doesn’t mean that she’s planning on it, he knows she just doesn’t trust herself enough to…

Someone else is on the roof.             

He slips the hearing aid from his pocket casually and while kicking at some loose gravel pushes the device back in his ear.

So much for distance.

With the aid back in place he can hear the movement of heavy fabric in the wind, like sails, only not sails because that would be fucking stupid. The not sails are to the right of the doorway. You go right Man, he thinks, I’m going left.

“Barton,” it’s a familiar voice. It’s a command in the disguise of his name. The sound makes sense now.

“Director Fury. Of course.”

“Of course?” Fury asks.

Clint reaches up tugging a grey hood out from beneath his leather jacket to pull it up and over his head. The wind is playing havoc with the aids and he’s already over this conversation.

“Well, my day just went to shit. Why the hell wouldn’t you turn up?”

“Oh, I’m sorry did I crash your pity party?” Fury says sardonically.

Fuck this guy, he thinks on reflex, fuck him and his all-knowing bullshit, fuck him and the let Hydra burrow right down into your super-secret spy ring and fuck him and his leave me to get the fuck out of dodge, do you even know how hard it is to hitch a ride on a modern freight train in the E fuckin U?

“Can’t a guy just sit on a roof and get a bit of distance without dead men accusing him of shit?” he mutters instead because picking a fight with Nick Fury is just asking for an ass kicking.

“That depends,” Fury muses to the audience of one, “Depends on whether you did or did not get one of my best agents with child.”

Hill. Natasha told him she’d still be working with Fury despite the job title change and no doubt a jump in salary.  

“Technically not an agent anymore.” Clint shrugs, “Technically not _your_ agent either.”

“I’m technically dead,” Fury announces, “Wouldn’t stop me from kicking your ass twelve ways to Sunday.”

Clint is not one to cower before a dead man, going down like a Bon Jovi song is more his speed. Right now, right this second, he is pissed. He is pissed for Natasha who thought she’d found a place she was trusted, thought she’d found a place she could trust. And he is pissed for a young Hawkeye who pulled a teenaged but deadly girl from the edge and told her he knew a place, a place of trust, a place of protection and a place of right.

“It was a really shitty thing to do to her,” he growls, his arms folded across his chest. Fury shakes his head once like atoning for this is the last thing he cares about.

“So you and Romanoff decided to take your grievances out on Hill?”

“Does Stark know she’s still working for you?” Clint snaps, lifting his chin in defiance.

“Technically,” Fury says emphatically, “Hill works for Stark Industries.”

“Technically.” Clint agrees unblinkingly, “Technically SHIELD Medical provided pretty bogus birth control.”

Clint sees the flash, the moment when Fury decided that rushing him and then slamming him into the concrete isn’t worth his time. In the flash, though, it’s a close run thing.

“Look at me Barton. Do I look like I give the first of any fucks about you or anyone else’s sex life? No! Because I am not in motherfucking high school. SHIELD is gone. The Avengers are the first line of defence against the threat that is Hydra, the Chitauri and any other unforseen big fucking bad that may come our way. You made decisions that put you on a path to having a child? You have a child? Make it work! Because trouble is coming, trouble is always coming.”

Clint stares at the man. SHIELD takes the world as it is and not as we’d like it to be, he used to say. He’d given Clint his second chance because he needed people who worked in the world the way it was. He’d given Natasha that same chance for that same reason.

“You practice that speech, Sir?”

“Shut the fuck up, Barton.”            

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So you asked for a Fury chapter and then I realized I can't write from Nick Fury's point of view because Nick Fury, no matter how loud he yells, is as Tony Stark tells us 'The spy, his secrets have secrets'. If I write from his point of view, I lose that. So instead you get this. I'm sorry. I hope you don't mind the compromise. Jencat I hope you like my version of what Fury might have to say about people's relationships. 
> 
> It's a short chapter because well Fury gets his point across and then leaves, he does not have time for your shit. 
> 
> This chapter goes out to Discordchick the first to comment on the last chapter. Thanks Discord, you've always been so supportive.


	10. Kate Bishop

Someone had entered up the fire escape.

Someone who didn’t care how much noise they were making.

Someone who was about to get his ass kicked by a girl.

She took Clint’s old bow from the always open wardrobe and nocked an arrow, target arrow but it could still do some impressive damage, especially when she was the one with the bow. Damn Clint and his macho need for excessive draw weights. Her shoulder was going to be pissed with her for days after this.

Kitchen, come on Bishop, let’s do this.

“KATIE!” he yells a little too loudly when she gets the jump in him. He pushes the grey hood back from his head, slouching a little like he’s ashamed of being caught. And well he might. And well he might.

“Clint!” she yells back, staring at him down the shaft of her arrow, “Where the fuck have you been!?”

“Kate, put down the futzing bow.”

“Futzing?” Is that even a word? “What?!” she lowers the bow, her arm was getting tired anyway, 90 pound draw practice bow, seriously Barton? You get as much distance from a 45 pound draw, show off.

“I can’t hear you,” he says as she looks down to pull the arrow from its nock. “I took my aids out.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Why?” he says, watching her lips with exaggerated focus.

“Yes. Why,” she articulates slowly stepping closer and into the dying light from the open fire escape window.

“I’m deaf, not a moron,” he says moving back behind the kitchen bench. He pops down behind the bench and rattles through a cupboard, “Don’t speak like that it distorts your lip movements.”

“Pretty sure you are a moron,” she says just in time for him to come back up.

“That’s offensive even if I can’t actually hear it.”

“Good,” she says twisting her mouth on the word. Just like Barton to show up out of the blue with no explanation. Why does she even care? The man is, like, grumpy old man trash. Yeah, but he’s her trash, she thinks quickly.

“Why are you here, Kate?”

“Because, like, ten months ago you said you had something to do in DC and could I keep an eye on the place.” She can’t help but put her hands on her hips, annoyance does that to her.

“Oh right. Sorry?” he says as if he isn’t exactly sure it’s his fault. Of course it’s his fault!

“Where the fuck have you been, Barton?”

“Um,” he squints and she can see him running through the possible permutations her lip movements could indicate before he says, “Places. Doing stuff. Running mostly,” he shrugs. Such a helpful answer, well, she can go home now, no need to worry, he’s been running.

“Why did you take your aids out? I can’t talk to you like this. You pay attention to like every second word even when you have them in.”

“Huh?” he leans forward on the bench. Kate rolls her eyes, at the very least he could try to read her body language.

“Why don’t you have your aids in?” she repeats.

“Wanted a little bit of distance. Didn’t think anyone would be here. Especially since SHIELD went…” he blows a large raspberry.

“Yeah,” Kate says petulantly, “Thanks for the heads up on that.”

“Hey, I didn’t get a heads up. Why should you?”

“I thought you were dead,” she says and he just shakes his head a little sadly, turning once more to the cupboards in the kitchen. He pulls open a door before answering from behind it.

“Yeah. So did I,” he sounds lost in thought, like she isn’t here at all. Then he shuts the door and grins at her, a stupid, charming grin and she really wants to smack it right off his face.

“And then I wasn’t dead,” he says still grinning, “and I had a pile of stuff to take care of and this place wasn’t at the top of it.”

“Thanks,” she says, hoping he knows it’s bitter even if he can’t hear her tone. “Do I even get to know what outranked scenic Bed Stuy and _**ME**_?”

He looks at her for a moment as if he’s sizing her up for something and then rubbing the back of his neck in the way he does whenever he is self-conscious about something he admits, “A futzing baby.”

“Baby?! What!” She is too shocked to comment on his second use of the insane ‘futzing’ in so many minutes. Hawkeye frowns for a second, his finger coming up like he wants to her to wait and then he flicks on the kitchen light.                                  

“Yeah,” he chuckles, “My face did something similar when I found out.”

“Who, the hell, would give you a baby?” she asks not entirely certain he isn’t joking. He has an idiotic sense of humour does Barton.

“Give?” he says and the rubs at his face like he has had one of those weeks where he’s been pulled out of dumpster at least twice. “Not so much. Had. I had a baby.”

“You knocked someone up?” Kate says feeling her jaw go slack at the very thought. Barton seems to wince.

“Something like that,” he says turning away again to search his kitchen for something. That something, she thinks, better be damn important, more important than Barton having a baby that’s for damn sure.

She taps him on the shoulder insistently until he turns back to her.

? she signs, giving up on getting him to pay attention to her lips as she speaks.

 

 

“NO!” she mouths, finding that no sound will to come. At any rate, the lack of sound doesn’t affect Barton who carries on his side of the conversation despite her state of shock.

“Yeah. Look Katie Kate, it’s a long story,” he says and though she hates when he calls her that she’d prefer to know how, in the hell, he and Natasha had a baby, than correct him.

“I have time,” she says tapping her foot.

“I don’t. I came to get a few things and then head back to the Tower.”

“Tower?  Tower!

Is       there?

Is the  ?"

“Yeah,” he says with a faraway look in his eyes.

“Can I see the  ?” she asks suddenly finding herself more excited about seeing a baby Barton than the prospect of visiting Avengers Tower.

He chuckles at her continued finger spelling of baby, “Yeah, some other time though, okay Hawkeye?” He reaches out to brush her on the side of the chin with his knuckles. It makes her feel like a little kid but she lets him do it. This once, she thinks, just because you’re someone’s dad.

“Okay Hawkeye.”

He nods once sharply and goes back to his cupboard search.

“Here it is!” he crows abruptly, holding a white coffee mug with a purple ‘H’ emblazed on it aloft like a trophy.

“A coffee cup? You came back for a coffee cup?!” she says when he turns to look at her in triumph.

“And my shoes.”

“Shoes and a coffee cup. I hate you Barton,” she says stomping off to find her handbag where she left it in his disused bedroom.

“No, you love me Bishop,” he calls, “What’s not to love?” he asks and she knows he wouldn’t be able to hear her response even if she made one. Cocky Bastard!  

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay peoples this chapter goes out to poodlecake85, despite the problems they had with the Fury chapter I really hope they enjoy this chapter.
> 
> I also hope all the sign works for you. I'm not going to translate. I think you can work it out from the text and also a little bit of learning some ASL from googlefu is never a bad thing. I, myself, sign AUSLAN the Australian Sign Language for work and for pleasure and was really excited by the Fraction/Aja comics return to a Deaf Clint. If you're not reading Hawkeye, what are you doing with your lives? :) 
> 
> So why isn't Clint back at the tower talking to Natasha? Why does he think a coffee mug is more important? Because our hero has the emotional maturity of a teaspoon. Tune in next time for more love, angst and languages. 
> 
> You all seriously rock, you know that right?


	11. Natasha Romanoff

When she has fallen asleep, the little girl fighting it every step of the way as though she knows of Clint’s absence, Natasha, only half aware of her movements, places her into the travel crib. On her back splayed like a star fish beneath the soft sea of a purple blanket, she twitches fitfully and then sighs as though she has resigned herself to some terrible fate. Natasha leans down over the fabric covered railing of a Walmart travel crib bought by the stubbornness of a man who refuses to miss. She strokes her daughter’s cheek lightly, wanting to tell her that true sleep is no terrible fate, that there a far worse fates out among the stars. But deciding that if the unknown black is a terrible fate to her daughter then she would fight to keep it so, fight to keep the wolves of darker fates from her door.

The bedroom door opens, she knows without looking it is him. She closes the novel she has been attempting to read, circling the same sentence for minutes and failing to place each of the English words into a context that would allow her to move on.

He leans down, his breath becoming a soft oh.

“She’s asleep,” Natasha says simply.

“Aw, I missed bath time?” he asks, removing the worn leather jacket and hooded sweatshirt he has layered over himself. His cheeks are flushed as though he has been running or the wind has whipped at his face. It must be the later she decides when he licks his bottom lip unconsciously.

“You missed a lot of things,” she says as his hands come back down to tug his t-shirt over his abdomen.

He looks down at her on the bed, his forehead creasing and his mouth forming a bemused hard line. “She started to walk?” he asks.

“She’s not even two months old.”

“Yeah but she’s your kid,” he says stretching over the bed to press a light kiss to her cheek, “she’s gonna be talented.” The kiss is wrong, the kiss is familial and formal. The kiss is distance.

“Where did you go?”

There is a gap, a pause, where he looks as if the truth is so vast he couldn’t hope to tell her. There is a gap where he looks as if he wants her to be the kind of person he could tell.

“Up,” he shrugs, moving past the gap as if it did not exist. The scruff on his chin is slowly becoming a goatee, if he was persistent enough to sculpt the wayward hairs instead of driven by a desire not to shave.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

He throws his head back, a crease forming between his eyes brows and his mouth slack before looking back down at her, “No. I got my coffee mug. Might have gone to the apartment. After our old Boss showed up.”

“Fury?” she asks, though she knows the answer.

“The man himself,” Clint says throwing his hands out sarcastically. When she’d told him of the fall of SHIELD, in the dark where he could not see her eyes, she had felt him tense, imagined the careful blankness in his face and the threat in his eyes.

“Hill told him.”

“Did we think it wasn’t going to happen?” he asks sighing.

“No.”

“Tasha,” he frowns, studying her as if he has seen something of concern, “he should have trusted you.”

“Should he have?” She closes her eyes.

“Natasha,” he says, she feels the bed dip as he sits.

“You don’t.” He doesn’t stop asking, it lives in his hands and his face, a permanent question of when she will leave. Sometimes it rises up inside him until he can’t keep it in his body and out flows the words, ‘When’.

His back is turned to her, he hunches over his knees “[Natasha](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvzWRzTh7jg) don’t you dare,” he growls, “I trust you with my life. I trust you with my daughter’s life.”

“You don’t trust me to stay,” she can’t help but say.

“Tasha, don’t do this,” he says standing once more. He goes to leave again, find a roof somewhere and distance himself from the rope of feelings untangling in his belly. She’d seen him do it before. Remembered him standing blank faced and furious on the safety barrier of an office building when she’d tried to seduce him by way of paying a debt. They’d been so much younger then, he wouldn’t tell her, couldn’t tell her, for years why he’d left and she never could articulate clearly why it mattered that he had.

“Why?” she says suddenly angry that he would ignore it, “It’s true, isn’t it?”

“No. No, it isn’t true,” he rounds on her, his eyebrows knitting and the creases at the corners of each mouth deepening, “You don’t trust you, Natasha. You.” He looks away before muttering to himself “God Dammit!”

“Hey!” he says, grabbing her wrist as she makes the doorway, she twists her wrist to free herself but he sees the move before she begins letting go suddenly and his strong arms coming up to push her back against the wall of the living room. “Come back here. You opened this thing up Pandora so you stay here until it’s finished,” he says, breathing hard in the pause between words, “I love you.”

“Love is…” she begins to say, a compulsion, a quote, a truth he refuses to acknowledge.

“What?” he demands and pushes harder, his fingers pressing into the fascia of her upper arms, “Love is what? For children? A fairy tale? Not meant for the likes of you?” His eyes darken. Arousal, her mind provides unbidden, not sexual, anger.

“Don’t do this,” she says, her gaze firmly fixed. She stands held against the wall by the force of his arms, he pulls her up on her toes as she speaks.

“I love you,” he says again and then he releases her. He moves, to walk away or pace she isn’t certain for as soon as he begins a strangled sob escapes her. His head snaps back. His gaze, a focused beam that earned him the name Hawkeye.

She tries to look away. “Hey,” he says softer than before, an earnestness in his voice that had been drowned out by his anger, “Hey Tasha, it’s okay. It’s gonna be okay even if I love you.”

“Stop saying those words.” She could hurt him. She is a weapon. He seems to forget the violence she carries, embedded in her like code.

“I don’t think I can,” he says as if he would give anything to be able to put them away, seal the jar she foolishly opened. “Not anymore,” he shakes his head, “We have a daughter. And I love her more than almost anything in the world. The one thing I know I love just as much? That’s you.”  

“Please,” she says softly. Don’t do this, we can live in the silence. These words they will break us, they will break me.

“I’m not saying it to hurt you.”

“Please. Don’t,” she asks her voice flattening and hollowing as she sinks to the floor.

“I love you, Natasha,” he sinks with her. He kneels like a knight at vigil.

“You can’t,” she forces out. He is too close. She can’t breathe.

“I can, I love you. I love your bad jokes and your ability to get red hair all over the bathroom. I love that you fight like a dancer and dance like a fighter. I love that you’re honest even when other people think you’re lying. I love that you put yourself back together piece by piece. I love that you went to ground for a child you didn’t know and a man you didn’t know was coming back.”

His list is endless. It spills out of him, fearless and fearful in the same mouthful. He loves even when he knows she cannot.

“Stop!’ she cries out.

“Okay, okay,” he says his hands coming forward like he wants nothing more than to soothe her.

“I can’t,” she gasps, now too tired to fight.

“Oh Nat. Nat, you already do," his voice like a cello, "You do every day. You love Lizzie.” How can he be certain? She reaches for the truth only to find it shifting in her fist, a chameleon.

“Clint.” The words won’t come. Other words try to fight their way from her lungs and out her mouth, words she isn’t sure she means. She barricades them in, launching herself over the hand grenade of words she could never take back. There are new words, words she doesn’t understand behind the barricade. Words that he wants to hear but that she isn’t sure are true. And all this time a crawling, gnashing fire in her throat, she wants to tell him of the fire, of the way it steals her words from her but those words are silenced too.

Still on his knees in front of her, he wipes the tears from her cheeks with the knuckles of his left hand. She stares, unblinkingly through the fog of them. His eyes are blue. They have lost the grey that fractured them so delicately in the haze of his own tears.

“It’s okay,” he says, “You don’t have to love me.”

She moans. She could bare anything, make it physical, make it solid, make the pain a place in her body to move into boxes and seal. She can’t bare this, this crush of his loss, the way he will martyr himself and dash himself against the rocks of her.

She could end this, she could walk from his life and slip into shadow. She could hope the tether that binds them, more now than ever, would snap if she pulled it taut enough.

She could slip into another woman, a woman who has the words, a woman who could speak those words to him. He may yet believe it was her.

If only the words would leave her own mouth.

“Oh Clint,” is all that will come.

He smiles. It’s a lost smile, childlike in its forgiveness. It’s a smile that says if she stays, if she says his name, if they are the only words that come, he will remain. Gently, he drags threads of hair from her face, tucking them behind her ear.

Her fingers flex and retract. If the words won’t come she will find another way. They burnt her to the ground. They took everything and yet she remains. She is survival. She is the other way. She is the infinitesimal possibility.

Her finger tips find his face, she traces the lines that have grown deeper over the years she has known him. She sweeps them across his forehead, the thick valley between his eyebrows, at the edges of his eyes, down the curves of his mouth. He is still like he will let her do whatever she wants with him. He is still like he is spent, spent of passion, of anger and of hope.

She kisses him. She breathes into him. She hopes.

There must be a way, a method, to transfer hope as if it were breath to a dying man.

His eyes stare back at her, his hands hovering uncertainly around her body. His mouth knows what to do, moving in practiced patterns as if they were sparring. He must see it, feel it somehow in the touch of her hand to his cheek, the way in which her tears fall on him now. He has to see it.

And then like a wave of pain rolling over you after a gunshot, he gives. His hand tangles itself into her hair, another wraps around her waist pulling her on to her knees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter goes out to Jencat, though you are forgiving of Clint Barton and his running away from his problem ways, it had to come to a head, they were just postponing it because of graver concerns.
> 
> The DVD extra is a theme song for this chapter, click on the link as you read and hear the musical equivalent of this fight.
> 
> You are all awesome!


	12. Natasha Romanoff

Her hair comes loose from her hair tie in his hands and his eyes finally close. He breaks from her mouth, kissing the salt from her cheeks and the corners of her lips. He is too soft, too gentle. It is too light to drown out the drumming in her head or the way her body betrays her with tears. She pushes back with her lips, sliding her hand down his chest to the buckle of his belt in a smooth movement.

He breathes in sharply when her nails scrape at the fine hair covered skin of his lower abdomen. His eyes open quickly, he searches her face. He does not stop kissing her even when she begins to pull apart the buckle with the single hand caught between them. She moves with him when she sees what he means to do, arm muscles flexing and contracting as he slides his hands beneath her buttocks and lifts, bringing himself to a stand.

She loops her legs around his waist, pushing down enough that he can feel her through his clothes. She hears him blow air derisively through his noses as he backs them one step to the wall. In response she tugs at his hair and pulls him closer.

He kisses her neck and allowing the wall to bear her weight, he shifts her hair and loosens the neck of her shirt. The rough skin of his fingers are warm against her. He has always been like a furnace. Even before this became part of who they are, he would wrap himself around her in the coldest parts of the world and share his warmth. He has always been generous with his warmth.

He finds, beneath her shirt, the hollow indentation above her clavicle and he kisses, sucks, until she shivers against him.

She wants more. The buckle finally comes away in her hand and she moves her hand to the zipper. He unbuttons her shirt flicking open buttons with his dexterous thumb and index finger, moving his lips to where ever skin becomes uncovered.

‘Faster,’ she wants to say, ‘harder’ but only her breath escapes her lips. She wants him to know how much she needs him, trying to find him with her hand between her legs. He seems fascinated with the way her breast meet the cups of her maternity bra, kissing infuriatingly at the sensitive skin. She cants her hips, grinding down on him as she lifts herself, stretching upwards to remove her bra. It isn’t that she wants his hands there, the sensitivity is still too much for the groping that might entail but she wants contact with him, she wants her skin pressed against his.

Her baby cries out.

Clint stops beneath her, they stare at each other frozen. They could be in an office in the dead of night waiting for a security guard to pass before they search the room. They wait, Clint burying his face in her hair and attempting to restrain his heavy breaths.

Elizabeth grumbles once and then follows with a wail that can only mean she will not be ignored.

In her hair, Clint begins to laugh softly, his shoulders shaking. Natasha smacks him across the ear.

“I’m sorry! She,” he laughs again, “she has my timing is all.”

“Let me down,” she orders, ignoring the empty frustration she feels opening up a hole inside her.

“Yeah, yeah, okay.” He steps back allowing her to slide her legs from his waist. She pulls her shirt back up over her shoulders.

In the bedroom, darkened by still shut curtains, in her crib Elizabeth struggles with her blanket tiny hands gripping the fabric and feet kicking. “Тише, Тише,” Natasha calls. She bundles the baby up and rocks her gently. Clint follows sometime after, fixing his belt buckle.

“Wet or hungry?” he asks. His eyes still show signs of the crying they have done and she knows her own face will be its equal.

“I’m surprised she didn’t wake before.”

He smiles a little tiredly, “If all we got from SHIELD was a diploma on how to fight quietly it was probably worth it.”

“No. It wasn’t.”

“Yeah, okay no,” he admits, one side of his mouth curving to a smile, “You want me to change her?” he offers.

Natasha shakes her head looking down at the sleepy child in her arms, “She’s not wet. Just unhappy.”

He sits beside her, unlacing his boots. He nods sharply and then leans down over the little girl murmuring, “Aw, kiddo whatchagot to be unhappy about?”

Natasha sings, soft and low. The words flow out of her easily, remembered with no memory to fasten them to. “[Спи](http://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=1044&c=157#multimediaBoxInternalLink), младенец мой прекрасный, Баюшки-баю. Тихо смотрит месяц ясный В колыбель твою. Стану сказывать я сказки, Песенку спою; Ты ж дремли, закрывши глазки,      Баюшки-баю.”

Elizabeth’s eyes droop and shut, they open three more times before she cannot open them again.

When Natasha looks up, Clint is examining her and he winces like he has been caught. “Why do Russian songs always sound like they are about burying people in the snow?”

She smiles, even with his hearing aids in his Russian is barely functional but he always stops and listens whenever she speaks in another language, something mesmerized in his face. “I’ve had the melody in my head for days. I don’t know where it came from. I have no memory of anyone singing it to me.”

“What’s it mean?” he asks tugging off his boots, “I got tales and the moon and child? No, boy?”

“Go to sleep my beautiful boy, the moon looks in your cradle.”

“So, your basic lullaby stuff,” he says sliding himself back along the bed into the pillows.

“Until the second verse.”

“That’s when we bury people in the snow?” he says facetiously, folding his hands behind his head. She leans down over the crib once more to lay Elizabeth down.

She shakes her head, stroking the new wisps of hair on Elizabeth’s head, “That’s when we send our children off to war.”

“Jesus Tash.” His face collapses into a horror the simple words of a lullaby should not inspire. She knows where his mind has gone, 28 little girls in a room as red as blood.

“Clint,” she says quietly. She wishes she could tell him not to think of her that way, she wishes she could say ‘I am not broken.’ But he has seen too much of her to believe that lie, he has seen programing pulled from her like a magician pulling scarves, he has seen her be the blade that others wield and he has seen her shudder in the aftermath.

“Tasha, I’m… I push… I push and I know I shouldn’t but…”

“You can’t stand living with the uncertainty,” she finishes for him.

“No,” he says and he means it as an agreement and a contradiction. He shakes his head more as though he were physically clearing his thoughts than anything to do with what he says next. “I’m not going anywhere, I’m here for the long haul. You and little miss grumpy, well, I wouldn’t know how to be without you now.”

“It will eat at you,” she says, unable to look at him.

“I’m stronger than I look.” He probably grins. He always grins when making these kinds of statements. He grins over the insecurity, over the feelings of inferiority, over the doubt.

“It isn’t fair.”

“If life was fair, even a little bit fair, you think you’d be you and I’d be me? I fight aliens and terrorists with a bow and arrow, that kinda thing only happens when life fucks you around a whole lot. Nah, Tash, life isn’t fair, but it made me, me and you, you and despite everything I wouldn’t change that, not if I get you, you and that little girl even for a moment…” he screws up his face looking confused, “That make any sense?”

“It’s okay.” She smiles. “I’m fluent in Russian, French, Latin and Barton.”

He just grins right back at her. He amazes her, his talent for hope. His worst moments have always been because he continues to hope and yet his best moments are too because he hopes.

She joins him, curling her legs around her on the bed and beginning to rebutton the debauched shirt.

“I didn’t hurt you, before, did I?” he asks gently. She looks back at him, hand hovering over a button. She has broken his ribs, his nose and several toes, he has carried bruises for days from sparring with her. He has seen her beaten and bloody after a fight, her capture and after interrogations. He has held her against a wall his arrow trained on her throat. Yet he fears this, fears Clint hurting Natasha, fears her pain when it isn’t a choice she has made.

“If you’d hurt me you would know about it,” she says definitively. He reaches towards her and runs his thumb across her cheekbone.

“I don’t want to hurt you. Not in any way.”

She captures his hand, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“It’s okay. Tasha, it’s like I said you don’t have to…”

“You are mine,” she interrupts, her fingers tightly clutching his. He looks at their hands for a moment, a confused half smile on his lips as though she was playing an unfamiliar children’s game.

“Huh?”

How to begin, how to explain when you haven’t the words, haven’t the experience. She feels her heart begin to race. She will piece this together from first principles, she will teach him of her culture, not Russian but Natasha. “Elizabeth, she is mine and you are mine.”

“Of course she’s yours,” Clint says, his blue eyes searching her face uncomprehendingly.

“And you, Clint Barton, are mine.”

“I’m yours,” he echoes.

“You are mine,” she says again, resting her head upon his shoulder.

“Okay Tasha,” he says as his arm closes around her, “Okay, I’m yours.”

“I am trying,” she says softly, thinking that she could fall asleep with him like this and when they woke he would still be there.

“I know you are… I…. I’m an idiot.”

“My idiot,” she says emphatically.

“Your idiot,” he agrees smiling. His chest is firm but warm and he twists to plant a kiss in her hair.

“My handsome idiot.”

“Your what now?”

“You heard me Hawkeye,” she says as she rests her hand over his belt buckle.

“Oh,” he says staring at her hand, “You think she’s going to let us finish what we started?”

“I think you better be quick.”

“Agh,” he groans in mock disenchantment, “So romantic!” He throws his head back against the pillows and she uses the opportunity to straddle him.

“Должна ли я заставить тебя замолчать??” she says sweetly, leaning down as she licks her bottom lip.

He brings his hands up to her hair pulling her down to him as he speaks, “So hot!” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter goes out to Beneathground, the flood gates are opened. Poodlecakes85, of course she was going to wake up :) 
> 
> Click on the link at the start of the song to hear the song sung, it is Cossack Lullaby. I see a lot of people using https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDMmj5WgB8c тили тили бом as a Russian Lullaby but this is actually a song written for a horror movie and not a real Russian Lullaby. Despite Clint's assertion that all Russian songs sound like they are about burying people in the snow it is not true, most Russian Lullabies are just as soothing and repetitive as English ones. 
> 
> Должна ли я заставить тебя замолчать?   
> Trans gloss is pretty much "Should I make you shut up?"   
> Thank you so much to tiziara for correcting my grammar... need to go back to Russian class badly. 
> 
> (My apologies but my Russian grammar is very very rusty.)


	13. Pepper Potts

Pepper regrets not asking JARVIS to inform the spies of her intention to ‘visit’ as soon as Natasha opens the door. Her red hair is wildly curled around her shoulders and she smiles in a relaxed way that looks so very odd upon her face. Pepper knows it was never high, high heels and tight pencil skirts that said anything about sex and Natalie Rushman, this is what sex looks like. A strawberries and cream complexion does nothing to hide the blush Pepper feels creeping. She blushes not because sex embarrasses her but because she is better than this, she is better than interrupting.

“Natasha,” she says.

“Pepper,” Natasha says, holding the door ajar as the baby begins to cry in the bedroom.

“Futz,” Pepper hears Barton exclaim before, “I got it!”

Natasha rolls her eyes and repeats, “He’s got it.”

“If this is an inconvenient time I can…” Pepper begins.

“Before there was Elizabeth we were Agents,” Natasha says fixing her large green eyes on Pepper and then opening the door wider, “There has never been a convenient time.”

“No,” Pepper agrees entering the living space. The layout has not changed since she was last here. “I expect relaxation and relationships take a back seat.”

“Something I know you too know a lot about.”

Every piece of furniture that was expressly chosen to furnish this suite is exactly where it was placed when the interior designers and work men left. Everything Barton and Natasha have brought with them, a surprisingly meagre amount for two people and an infant, is still in boxes against the corner of the room far from the large windows. As far as Pepper can tell they have not even used the entirety of the kitchen though she can see a breast pump and bottles dried and waiting near the sink.

There are no toys or books or thousands of soft pillows and blankets that always seem to threaten to swallow new families’ whole. Pepper wonders if the bedroom has also remained the same, a spartan absence of colour and light, as if they were planning of fleeing in the middle of the night. It seemed in such stark contrast to the way the two former SHIELD agents cared for the child. She doubted the baby had been put down since she had been born. The warmth Elizabeth was surrounded by was entirely secured by two people Pepper might have argued once had the warmth of an ice cube.

“If you have a moment, Tony and I have something we wish to give you both,” she says certain she has failed to hide her examination of the room.

“Other than sanctuary?”

“Do Avengers have sanctuary?” Pepper almost laughs at the thought, “I thought this was more a headquarters for staving off the end of the world.”

“Ah,” Natasha says grinning, if it were possible to grin sarcastically, “Mr Stark has told you about his _Pokemoning_?” That word, and the ridiculous way Tony says it has followed her since they first rebuilt the tower, in truth it has been nice to have Bruce around just for someone else to roll their eyes at the sentiment.

“Tony tells me everything,” she sighs though she knows she is smiling, she wants to add ‘eventually’ but doesn’t, “I spend much of time saying no. He is currently infuriated that Thor believes the United Kingdom to be preferable to the Tower.”

Natasha smiles faintly as if she is well aware of what Tony would be like this close and yet not quite to a collection. Pepper supposes Natasha is actually well aware of what a frustrated Tony is like. She walks to the sink before she answers, her bare feet silent on the tiled floor. She does not walk out towards the center of the room instead she follows the curve of the wall to reach for a glass and fill it with water. “Thor believes Dr Foster to be preferable.”

“Ah, young love,” Pepper muses.

“Is it ‘young love’ if the man in question is a centuries old god?” Natasha replies, something playful in her eyes.

“If the love is young?”

“Perhaps.”

“Elizabeth Romanoff Barton stop moving about,” Barton says loud enough for Pepper to hear from the lounge. “Young ladies do not go about without diapers on!” She had not even noticed how quickly the baby’s cries were quelled. Perhaps when Barton said he had it, he did indeed have it.

“Is he okay?”

“The highly trained marksman attempting to change a diaper?” Natasha asks resting her hip against the kitchen counter.

“Yes.”

“Probably not,” Natasha says, the playful twinkle once again returning. Pepper finds herself smiling, this is possibly the closest she will ever get to including Natasha Romanoff in casual conversation. Every time the woman smiles or frowns or walks barefoot to a kitchen sink Pepper feels herself not quite letting go of the thought that it could all be a fiction. She finds herself deliberately drawing to mind the way Happy hit the mat when Natalie flipped him over himself.

“Gift?” she says trying to forget the image again and twisting on her heels away from the bedroom door.

“Is entirely unnecessary.”

“No,” Pepper argues, “that would be what Tony planned before I said no.”

“On behalf of the world at large,” Natasha says standing upright again, her stance widening a fraction, “I should like to thank you for your service.” She nods at this and Pepper is reminded of Phil Coulson’s habitual politeness.

Barton enters then walking close to the wall, the infant resting on his right shoulder. “I don’t know how she did it but this child has already inherited your gymnastics skills,” he says, softly patting her navy onesie’d back. Pepper fancies for a second that the navy makes the child look like a tiny SHIELD agent. The baby’s head has wisps of fine hair and the light catches it as Barton approaches making it look as if her head is haloed with a warm sunset orange.  

“And your inability to follow orders?” Natasha answers quickly. Barton looks up then from the child. He doesn’t startle as though he didn’t know she was there but rather she feels suddenly caught in his crosshairs as if she was new information to be assessed rather than another person.

“Miss Potts.”

“Mr Barton,” she says trying to smile professionally. He has the sharpest blue eyes she has ever seen on any man and she thinks that she would hate to sit opposite him in a negotiation. “You are living here, I think you can call me Pepper.” Barton nods once.

“Pepper has a gift for us,” Natasha says and Pepper feels the way she assesses her reaction to Barton.

“Gift? Why?” he seems actually shocked by the concept. His posture shifts and he scratches the back of his head while speaking directly to Natasha.

“Are you both trained to be _this_ terrible at receiving gifts?”

“Nah, that’s a talent we come by naturally,” he says oddly proud. When he smiles Pepper imagines she can see what it is Natasha sees in the man, a boyish charm that hasn’t been there before.  

“The gift in question is in the main lounge. With Tony. If you don’t agree to come now I’m afraid he may begin alterations.”

“Nat?” Barton asks as though he is looking for orders.

“We cannot be responsible for that.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poodlecakes another chapter for you. Sorry this one took so long. AOU sadness seems to steal silly baby fic inspiration.


	14. Tony Stark

Tony is now bored. Pepper is taking too long and Bruce thinks Dr Jane Foster is more interesting to talk to than he is. She isn’t. Not for the first time he wonders why he has ended up surrounding himself with people who won’t get drunk with him. He has a small screw driver in his pocket and he pretty sure he could take apart…

“Tony. No.”

“Tell me the truth now, did you just agree to be my girlfriend because saying no makes you hot?”

Pepper’s lip purse very slightly and her nose scrunches when he says the word girlfriend. If he were another kind of man he might feel insulted by her distaste for the word but he is Tony Stark and she is his whatever she wants to call it at least until the next time he screws up. Her hand slides into his pockets. He raises his eyebrows, leaning into her touch and licks his bottom lip.

She smiles, politely removing her hand with the small grey headed screw driver.

“No,” she says simply before turning to the assembled… assembly. “They’ll be up shortly.”

“And we are sure jumping out and yelling surprise is a good idea,” The Captain’s friend Sam Wilson asks. “You know what with the spy and the assassin thing?” They have the same way of standing. It must be trained. Seventy odd years apart but they manage to stand tall and relaxed at the same time as though the military thought this was the one thing it should make important down through the decades, the ability to make him look like an anxious dwarf in his own home.

“We’re jumping out and yelling surprise?” Bruce says his forehead furrowing with further concern. Tony sizes him up and decides that if he stands closer to Bruce, his greatness will not be mitigated by the military show ponies and the giant god in the room.

“No. We are not,” Pepper says firmly.

“Good call,” he says, kissing her quickly on the cheek, “Romanoff has, if anything, just gotten scarier.”

Pepper waves her hand at him as if to shoo him off, “It is not a surprise party. We are here to remind them both that they have friends.”

“With gifts,” Bruce says.

“Surprise gifts,” Wilson says.

“But not a surprise party,” Rogers says altogether too dryly for Captain America. Tony raises an eyebrow, did Steve Rogers just sass his girlfriend?

“This is a tradition on Midgard, to instruct the honourees at a gathering to feel surprise?” Thor rumbles. Tony can see he is only asking the tiny astrophysicist he has brought with him like a security blanket but the big guy’s voice carries.

“I think it is supposed to create delight?” she answers her voice rising at the end. Everything that has come out of her mouth since Tony was introduced has been either a faced paced gasp of curious recognition or a question like statement that undercuts her clear scientific prowess. “I’ve never enjoyed them. People dragging you out of the lab and jumping out at you in the dark. No, thank you.”

“One side effect of the other guy is I doubt I’ll have to deal with that again,” Bruce agrees.

Tony feels his mouth pull upwards with the formation of an embryonic plan.

“No, Tony,” Pepper says at his elbow, her strawberry hair flicking over her shoulder with the speed at which she turns to him.

Wilson and Rogers chuckle and then Rogers says to Pepper, “You are going to have to teach me how you do that Miss Potts.” It’s a charm offensive, the worst kind of offensive, he wants to wrap his arm around Pepper and sweep her out of the room in retaliation, “When I say no, he just does things anyway.”

“Pepper. Please Captain,” she says and as if reading his mind, which he supposes she’s always been able to do, she put her hand on his forearm, softly and inconspicuously but enough to steady him. “From now on the only one calling me Miss Potts will be JARVIS.”

“Noted Miss Potts,” JARVIS says. Jane Foster looks at once surprised and then delighted but he will cut her some slack as she has just flown in from London, apparently she had decided against Mjölnir airways.

“Told you it was an ambush,” Barton intones, the sound of the elevator doors opening having been hidden by JARVIS. Tony suspect the lack of warning has something to do with JARVIS’s fondness for Romanoff, a buggy fondness he’s going to have to track down in the program. You can’t have spies, even pretty red head spies with daunting babies in tow getting into your best friends brain.

“Surprise,” Thor says as if he is delivering a commandment from on high.

“Oh, No,” Jane Foster gasps and Thor turns to her, his entire face asking for explanation, “No. No, I’ll explain later.”

Barton stops a foot behind Romanoff, he looks as if he’d rather not be here. He always looks as if he’d rather not be in close quarters with anyone except Romanoff. But there is something else, the way he takes in Thor and shifts the baby so she is no longer looking outwards in his left arm but turned against him.

“Captain. Wilson,” Romanoff says to the men closest to the elevator.

“Wow, she just gave you the disappointed tone, that’s not good Cap,” Wilson says slapping Rogers on the chest. His face breaks into an easy grin when he turns back to Romanoff, “Hey there. So kicking double agents off buildings while making whole people? Impressive.” And then he does something that Tony would think you could never in a million years get away with and leans in kissing Agent Natasha Romanoff’s cheek.

She smiles, “Couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Excuse me?” Barton says in mock horror as he moves closer.

Romanoff merely rolls her eyes and then gestures over her right shoulder at him, “Sam Wilson, Clint Barton.”

“Ah, the baby daddy?” Wilson asks.

“So she tells me,” he says offering his right hand as he speaks, “Clint, not Hydra.”

Wilson takes it easily, giving a firm shake, “Sam. Glad to hear it.”

“We were lured here under false pretences,” Romanoff says eyeing Rogers sceptically.

“Not false,” Pepper interjects, “There are presents.”

“Aye, many offerings for the young warrior,” Thor gestures towards the small pile Pepper has built on the coffee table behind them.

Jane Foster beside him cringes for a second and then offers hopefully, “Or physicist!”

Bruce smiles as if that might not be a safer profession for the spawn of Romanoff and Barton, who wriggles in Barton’s grasp.

Rogers seems to see something in Natasha’s expression because he rushes to add, “Or whatever she wants to be,” and then looking expectantly at the baby he asks, “Could I… Could I hold her?”

“We’d be hard pressed to find a safer place for her,” Barton says to Natasha who gives a small nod after a second of indecision.

“I wouldn’t bet on that!” Tony exclaims as infants are shifted into solid American arms.

“Tony?” Pepper says her smiles turning very quickly into a frown, “What did you do to the crib?”

“Crib?” Natasha says.

“Yes. Well, I suppose the surprise is ruined now,” she says switching from Natasha back to him accusingly, “Though I don’t know what Tony has done to it so…”

“Surprise?” Bruce declares weakly closing his eyes as if to prevent nausea.

“But Banner is allowed to say it,” Thor says to his little girlfriend.

“Ironically,” she answers, patting him on the enormous bicep.

“I thought,” Pepper says firmly, “that Elizabeth might appreciate a place to sleep that didn’t have travel in its name.”

“And I thought why stop there?” Tony adds barely allowing her to finish, “Especially after the tactical baby bjorn idea was nixed.”

“I’m afraid I only got her a teddy bear,” Rogers says his eyes still fixed on the infant in his arms. He looks gooey. The baby looks… Bartonish, like she is scanning The Captain for places she could put an arrow. Should babies that young be able to frown?

“He got overwhelmed in the toys r us,” Wilson says laughing, “Especially when he saw the Heroes of New York action figures.”

Those stupid dolls make a lot of money for the Stark relief foundation, even if he couldn’t get most stores to stock the Widow ones. Their reasoning, ‘We can’t stock a doll that is an admitted assassin and has been up before congress, Mr Stark.’ rings altogether too falsely considering how often he’s been called before congress and their willingness to sell big green hulk figures.

Rogers shakes his head and then in a voice that glides from one sound to the other he says, “Babies in my day got hand me downs and…”

“Polio,” Tony finishes for him, “How did we get on to Cap’s depressing childhood when we have this state of the art Stark Industries Infant Protection Sleep Pod?” He sweeps across the room to the expensive dark wood crib. It doesn’t look like he’s messed with it, because he is a mechanic but he is also an artist and he rolls his eyes at Pepper’s horrified expression.

“Good grief,” Banner says under his breath. Tony ignores him.

“It monitors heart rate, oxygen levels and temperature. And push this handy little button,” he pulls away the giant red bow, the kind you are supposed to put on cars or giant custom made Christmas bunnies, to show the control panel, “Shields! SHIELDS for the baby SHIELD agent.” He taps the dash and there is a flash of bluish light and then nothing, he flicks at a space above the crib and illustrates the way his finger is rebounded with a jolt, “Now I’ve been working on some retro reflective panelling for a stealth mode…”

“Stealth mode?” Pepper interrupts rubbing her temple, “Why on earth would a crib need stealth mode?”

But Romanoff steps forward and stares at the crib, “It’s wonderful.”

“Huh?” he says, “You. You like it?”

“Thank you, Tony,” she says and she looks right at him, big green eyes and a half smile.

“For my cooperation right?” he says, suddenly feeling like he’d like to get very drunk.

“No,” she says and it’s earnest and it makes it worse. “Thank you. Just thank you.”

“Yeah. No. Stop that,” he orders. It’s like she’s handing him something, something too precious, too delicate, “You’re creeping me out.” He looks up at Barton who follows Natasha like a satellite, at a distance but always in orbit, “This is hormones right?”

“Nah,” Barton says, a kind of cowboyish laziness to the word, “We’re grateful. Thank you. Mr Stark,” he turns slightly giving Pepper a boyish grin Tony would have sworn would not have been possible on that killer face, “Pepper.”

Pepper smiles back gratefully, “I’d say we could return it if you didn’t like the finish but someone invalidated the returns policy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here you go. Jencat you get this chapter... which will continue soon from yet another person's perspective. 
> 
> Hope you all enjoy it and are still reading it. I'd love to hear from you all!


	15. Jane Foster

“I too wish to give the child something,” Thor says at her elbow. She’s trying to stay inconspicuous. She doesn’t know these people. Knows of them for sure, there isn’t anyone left on the planet surely that doesn’t know Iron Man and The Hulk. Darcy has one of those Heroes of New York action figures tacked to her computer screen. It’s very strange that the life size version is standing not three feet away holding a small redheaded baby.

“A blessing from my mother,” Thor bows his head a little. She did not expect this and at once wants to take his hand. He says mother and her brain floods with the image of the great golden woman, determined and graceful. Not for the first time she wonders how she came to be a part of this world, one where science and magic collide at an astounding rate, “May I speak to the child?” Thor continues.

Behind the beautiful woman with red ringlets, that Jane can’t help but envy, is the man Thor calls Barton, he is a sturdy looking man in subdued workman type clothes but familiar.

“Isn’t that a little Disney,” Barton says wryly.

“[T](http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/pfrancis/Music/library/k30000.mp3)ише,” Natasha Romanoff says, a sound like the hiss made by the wide range of frequencies emitted by a star and Barton is silenced at once. She turns back to The Captain who looking up allows Natasha to reclaim her infant. Jane takes a step back, babies have never been her thing, she likes math and finding structure in chaos… babies create chaos, babies are entropy. Also babies are all too easily dropped.

Thor leans down over the small child and Natasha. In a smooth, loping language, that sounds faintly of the language that surrounded her in _Tromsø,_ he begins what sounds like a prayer, “[B](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSWXEKChD5M)arn, veraviturogvera…” she thinks she can make out “eikinni Yggdrasil tilannars tilað …” and she recognize the tree, a great ash tree binding worlds together, hastily drawn in her notebook to describe a larger more important truth, “þig ekki,” he finishes stroking his large fingertip down the infant’s cheek. The baby stares back and Jane would think it was with awe if two month olds could comprehend enough to be in awe.

Natasha nods, in her face a kind of serenity she has not had since Jane first saw her walk through the elevator doors. Jane wonders if the woman Tony Stark describes as scary has understood the blessing though it rushed past her ears like poetry.

“That was beautiful,” Jane can’t help but gasp, Thor turns and smiles patiently, “What was it?”

“Old Asgardian,” he says in answer, “I wish her wisdom and immunity from harm. I would walk little one from one end of the great branches of Yggdrasil to the others and demand all the worlds swear not to harm thee.” Behind Natasha, Jane can see Barton’s shoulders lower unlike Natasha he had not found the blur of Asgardian soothing. Thor looks back up to Natasha and her tense partner and smiles openly, “A [mother](http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=brown&book=giants&story=balder) did this once for another.”

“We also bought a rocking chair,” she finds herself offering up, again reminded that she is an interloper in what must be a particularly personal time.

“May I present the Doctor Jane Foster,” Thor says, taking her hand in his. “This, Jane, is Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow and Clint Barton also known as Hawkeye.”

“Thor’s Jane,” Natasha says as though she has heard far too much about her, “The reason he stays.”

“Oh,” she answers, feeling her cheeks flush, “I don’t know about that.”

She won’t look at Thor now, if she looks at Thor she will get that terrible glazed look like she’s discovered a new star and Thor won’t prevent it, he’ll just stare back, ridiculously comfortable in his own skin.

“Dr Foster,” Barton says, offering his own hand.

“Sorry, I don’t mean to stare. I mean, I recognize everyone, of course. You’re the Avengers. You know that, sorry, there’s a big A on the side of the building.” Too late she realizes she’s still holding on to Clint Barton’s hand. She drops it and smiles hoping to cover the gaffe, “It’s just, you look so familiar.”

“Ah. Yeah,” Clint Barton says and then breathes like he is relaxing into something, his forehead scrunches and he admits, “Your intern kicked me in the shin when I returned her [i](http://8tracks.com/chezamanda/i-just-downloaded-like-30-songs-on-there)Pod.”

Her mouth instantly forms a circle of recognition. SHIELD Agent number whatever. Dusty, in black. The other one, the one Thor called Son of Coul apologizing again for the removal of her equipment and records and Darcy kicking Clint Barton in the shin and saying ‘All my songs better still be on here, man in black.’

“I’d say I was sorry but Darcy was right,” she shrugs a little, “That was not cool.”

“Cool wasn’t part of the job,” he shrugs back, his blue eyes sharp even though his posture is less tense.

“Speak for yourself, Barton,” Natasha says with a small shake of her head.

“Everything you do is cool,” he answers tiredly and then reaches across to tickle his daughter's chin.

“Barton,” Tony Stark calls and everyone including Barton turns towards the bar where he is standing, “You’ll drink right, Captain Spangles can’t, Thor is immune to our mortal intoxicants and Bruce…”

“Has a large green reason not to,” Dr Bruce Banner finishes from where he stands discussing what she thinks might be the layout of Ikea stores with Pepper Potts CEO, Captain America and the tall black man who’d introduced himself as ‘Just Sam Wilson’.

“Not a member of your club but totally here to be offered fine whiskey,” Just Sam Wilson replies and Jane catches the way Barton seems to silently ask for permission from Natasha, a blink and you’ll miss it moment of eye contact between the two former agents.

“A Falcon and a Hawk, come my little aviary and imbibe,” Tony Stark says expansively.

Jane gets lost in the moment that the groups break apart and reform, she can hear Barton say to Wilson, “Nat said you demanded medical attention for her shoulder,” in a voice that is all too comfortable with living like you might need to demand medical attention.

“Yeah,” Wilson chuckles, “might not have realized how little Hydra gave a shit.”

“Still,” Barton says as they climb the stairs to the bar, “You had her back after knowing her all of a day. That puts you in my good books.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Tony Stark is pouring out tumblers of whiskey and Jane turns to listen in with fascination as they continue to talk, “And he stopped death raining down on us from the sky.”

“I just followed the Captain’s orders,” Wilson say with a big easy going grin.

“Sidekicks are people too,” Stark says, Barton pauses over his own whiskey raising an eyebrow.

Wilson lowers his own glass before answering, the big grin disappearing, “This is good whiskey so I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.”

She turns back to Natasha and Thor just as Natasha asks, “Did Stark ask you to leave London for this?”

Tony Stark had been calling for weeks, offering Thor many extravagant things to return to New York. When that had not worked he’d started offering Jane jobs, that had had more success in that Thor had felt honour bound to present the offers to her. It was Pepper Potts who had asked them to return with information Thor would not ignore.

“Is not a child of such great heroes reason enough?” he asks, a slight frown forming.

“Clint and I are not heroes,” Natasha answers quickly enough that Jane feel like it’s a trained response. “We can only hope that Elizabeth does not carry the weight of what we are.”

She watches Thor think on this and then sadly he says, “Then let the truth be her constant companion. It was the tragedy of my brother that he never knew the name of the weight that he bore until it’s unknowing had twisted him beyond recognition.”

Natasha stills, one perfect eyebrow raising, “The name Loki will not convince Clint.” She holds the baby a fraction closer.

“Loki did use him ill,” Thor rumbles thoughtfully and Jane takes his hand again, her own small hand quickly swamped by his. “If it would help, Loki is dead.”

“Dead?” Natasha says strangely flat.

“He died in the attempt to save our worlds.”

“He saved me,” she says not certain why she wishes to defend the reason so many had died in New York, other than it hurts Thor to think of his brother maligned, “Before that I slapped him,” she knows she is smiling nervously, she can’t help but smile nervously Natasha Romanoff looks at you like she is a human lie detector, “I don’t think he cared. That I slapped him I mean. In the end I think he did care about the universe.”

“I am sorry for your loss,” says Natasha. Jane thinks there is a total honesty in the statement. She is sorry for his loss, for his grief, she will never be sorry for Loki’s death.

“There has been too much loss,” Thor says squeezing her hand once, then in a new tone, “A child is a joy on Midgard as in Asgard.”

“She is a beautiful baby,” Jane says hopefully.

“She is mine.”

“Then let us celebrate,” Thor says lifting his voice, “for none of us is alone in our grief or in our joy and nor will your child be.” 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've made old Asgardian with words of Icelandic which is the closest living language to Old Norse... the words run together because when you listen to languages you don't know, you hear phonemes not words or their boundaries. And of course Jane misses quite a few words in there too. I apologise if you know Icelandic and I have used the masculine form for child or some other irritating grammatical mistake. I spent my 10 days in Iceland apologising constantly for not speaking Icelandic and greeting and thanking people in poorly pronounced Swedish to compensate. This is not to say the population of Reykjavik expected me to speak anything but English but I still felt guilty. 
> 
> Your DVD extras are included. In the Icelandic if you click on the link you'll get to hear some Old Norse. If you click on Tasha's 'Tishe' you can here what a star sounds like, it's harsh and staticy but then I'm not an astrophysicist and maybe Jane Foster finds that kind of thing beautiful. Click on mother to read about Baldr and the mistletoe. And click on iPod to hear the 'Like 30 songs' Darcy had downloaded on to her iPod (thanks to Cod Jams on 8tracks)
> 
> Thank you again for reading. And those who continue to comment, if you want a small gift (not Tony Stark level cool I'm afraid) send me an email. You all rock and Beneathground this chapter is for you.


	16. Clint Barton

Natasha is surrounded by pillows on their shared bed feeding little Lizzie as he moves unwrapped gifts to appropriate places. When she thinks he isn’t looking she winces or breathes a little sharper. He knows it still hurts, if not as much as before, knows the effort she is expending trying to hide it from him. At night when he holds her he knows not to let his hands stray to the taut and raw areas of her body. She never says anything and he wonders sometimes if she even knows how to say that something hurts.

She is talking softly to the little girl in her arms as he puts the oldfashionedly weighted bear Rogers bought into the miraculous Stark Pod. She’s speaking low enough with her face tilted down towards the child that he can’t make out the words, his hearing aids just provide the muffled hum of her voice. The expensive alcohol Stark served is currently making everything feel softened and heightened all at once.

He leans down to unpin the travel crib and feels a pang of something he quickly shakes off. He lifts the folded crib and carries it out into the lounge of the suite, stacking it against the wall. They can decide what to do with it in the morning, or never.

When he returns to the bedroom Natasha has shifted Lizzie on to her shoulder, patting her gently. The milky white expanse of her breast unevenly covered by the loose red shirt she wears. Natasha’s eyes are closed, her eyelids colored by the fragile veins beneath them. Lizzie hiccups and Natasha continues her narration. He watches from the door way as her mouth shapes the words.

“When I met your Daddy, [ma](https://translate.google.com/?ie=UTF-8&hl=en&client=tw-ob#auto/ru/little%20girl)ленькая девочка, he had almost no hair. Just like you. Your hair is soft and it curls.” She’s right Lizzie’s wisps of copper hair curl easily round your fingertips like Natasha’s own hair. “Your Daddy had spikes of hair, I could see his scalp through it. Shorter than the military, he looked like the kinds of men that think themselves dangerous.”

She opens her eyes now and looks at him leaning against the door frame. “And,” she continues to Lizzie, “when he didn’t know what he was doing he would run his hand over it, from the back of his neck to his face and back again.” He remembers that, the way the prickles of it felt under the flat of his hand and how often he felt like he didn’t know what he was doing, just that what he’d been ordered to do hadn’t seemed right. “I remember that so clearly,” she says and he thinks she’s saying it to him until she adds, “Just like I remember every second of you clearly.”

Maybe this is how she compensates for the barrage gifts and the overtures of friendship. He’d felt overwhelmed by it too, the ways these people just seemed to care about them. He’d wanted to tell them to stop it. If such a thing was allowed to be said. He and Natasha were people who’d earned trust through hard yards and acts of amends. It was how they’d earned each other’s trust. It felt too close to pretending to be someone else for him, he could only imagine how it felt for her. So maybe she needed to remind herself and remind Lizzie that they weren’t like everyone else. Remind them that she had met the father of her child when he had a shaved head, a weapon trained on her throat and a barely thought out offer.

“I’d been undercover, neo-[Nazis](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/ms_r_skeeter/11163737/918132/original.jpg). Before I got the mission,” he says.

She nods, her cheek rubbing against the soft downy hair of Lizzie’s head, “I didn’t know.” I didn’t know but it makes sense, her nod seems to say.

“I didn’t tell you?” he says frowning. Over the years he’d thought he’d told her everything. She still had secrets, he might even one day accept that she always would have, some of which she didn’t have a choice in keeping. But he’d thought everything he was and had done had been if not freely told, absorbed from him like osmosis.

“The first few months everything’s…” she says.

“Yeah,” he finishes for her not needing her to go over the horrors for his sake, “I know.”

She smiles as Lizzie gurgles, “You talked a lot.”

“Thought you might be lonely,” he shrugs.

“Thought you were crazy,” she says as he makes his way to join her on the bed, “Crazy man pretending to be a SHIELD agent. All eyes and babble.”

She had said that one day. He’d visited and she had said first in angry Russian and then in the perfect mimic of his own accent, ‘Why must you come and babble at me?’ ‘лепетать’ he’d liked that [word](https://translate.google.com/?ie=UTF-8&hl=en&client=tw-ob#ru/en/%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8C), reminded him of lily pad and he’d liked that she was angry. She should be angry.

He smiles, “Now what do you think?”

“Oh,” she smiles back wickedly, “Now I know you’re crazy.”

“Don’t you believe her, Lizzie,” he instructs the sleepy looking baby as Natasha settles her among the pillows.

“Stark finally got the complete set,” she says increasing her volume as he looks away to tug off his boots.

“Hmm? Yeah… s’pose he did.” He gets up, heading to the ensuite to wash his hands.

“Thor is not his brother,” she says to his back. So she saw that. Of course, she saw it. She sees everything. He keeps walking though his body wants to freeze.

“Thought they looked different,” he calls back hoping for once she’ll let it drop.

“Dr Foster says your Daddy thought an iPod was a threat to world security.” There isn’t any point in reiterating how nefarious data can be stored in the coding on a music storage device or that he wasn’t the one who made that call. She knows it all. More importantly she is letting the way he clenches around reminders of Loki Prince of Douches, drop for the time being.  

“The big guy looks at her like she hung the moon,” he says ducking his head back out of the doorway with a towel in hand.

She nods her agreement her finger entwined in Lizzie’s grip, “With her doctorate, she may well have. Or at least worked out the equations.” Her volume lowers when she looks back at him, naturally compensating when he can’t see her lips, the room is quiet and softly furnished and his aids are the best, the SHIELD best, but she habitually adjust for him anyway. “Very intelligent,” she says, “Handled superheroes and Stark despite it being thrust upon her.”

“If the reports that came in from Greenwich are accurate she handled a hell of a lot worse,” he replies as he sits back down beside her on the bed. “Wilson’s a good guy. He handled Stark, seems to bring the Captain out of his shell,” she smiles at that. He knows she’s glad especially if Steve Rogers is still hell bent on finding the solider. She knows a little too much of what he might find at the end of that rainbow.  

It is night again now. After last night and the way they’d finally burst at the seams he had had plans, provided Lizzie and world saving allowed, to have stayed in bed with her all day. Kiss every inch of her that he was allowed near. He wasn’t sure why he planned things anymore. Planned hot wall climbing, ‘You’re alive!’ sex, find instead a 37 week pregnant spy. Plan 'we can have sex' again, 'I just told you I love you' sex, get a Pepper Pott’s superhero baby shower instead. Maybe he should just stop planning to have sex.

“Did you enjoy your expensive alcohol?” she says and it’s probably just the expensive alcohol and the lack of follow through on his plans that make it sound sultry.

“You know?” he says leaning down over Lizzie as she fights back against her heavy eyelids, “I think I prefer rotgut and bruising with you.”

 **“**[Port](https://www.google.com/maps/@19.7586108,-72.195,766m/data=!3m1!1e3) international du Cap-Haïtien?” she says her intonation perfectly Haitian [French](https://youtu.be/i8Dnl2JtloE?t=33). He chuckles, a night spent in a shipping container when they didn’t think they could get back to the safe house uncompromised. His ribs bruised in the shape of a tire iron with only his tac vest's protection between them and shattering. Clairin, cheap clairin and blood crusting on her bottom lip. He’d wanted to kiss it anyway and kept to his side of the container despite himself **.**

That, raw and blood covered, that was them, “When did we become people who have futzing baby showers?” he asks.

“Do you think the baby has something to do with it?” she asks, blinking just enough to show she enjoys being facetious.

“Nope,” he says stretching out the vowel and pulling his finger from Lizzie’s grip, “Not putting all of this on her.”

“No, I suppose it happened when I said we should run and hide and you made different call. “

“Of course,” he slaps his forehead, “My fault.”

She smiles, scooting forward on the bed. “The crib is...”

The crib is futzing amazing, nothing short of amazing. Simple and elegant to look at, something that demonstrates the eye of Pepper Potts but then beneath the deceptively normal, if expensive, looking crib is the kind of protection they’d be running a 24 hour detail to provide.

He’d wired in shielding that was coded to their DNA. So that while they were functional only he or Natasha could turn them off or access the precious cargo inside. Tony Stark had explained at high speed, Clint couldn’t determine if it was due to alcohol or just the speed at which his mind worked, that he didn’t want a half asleep archer getting thrown across the room because he’d forgotten to take the shields down. After all that work, the billionaire still didn’t want to hold Lizzie.

“Yeah, whodathunkit. Tin man's got a heart,” he says picking up Lizzie, she makes snuffling sounds into his chest, “Think I'm gonna miss holding on to her all the time.”

“She's like her Daddy,” she says raising her eyebrow, “she doesn't go down easy. You may still get some use out of the rocking chair.”

“Romanoff!” he exclaims, “We are the kind of people who own a rocking chair!” The rocking chair in question now stands in the far corner of the room. A corner they had not used.

She smiles, closed lipped and eyes rolled, “You already owned a rocking chair, Clint Barton.”

“No,” he says standing to put Lizzie into the pod of protection, “That house I... Idunno. I curate it. I'm tied to it... And it's crappy furniture. This, feels different, you know?”

“Like we were subject to a vast conspiracy to make us normal?”

“Well that. Of course. But,” and he pauses, the words not quite coming, she’d have the words to describe this. Instead she just watches him standing there in bare feet with a baby in his arms expecting him to explain. “Like I was given something... Clean. Something new and clean.”

“Elizabeth, remember this. If you are to learn to hope, you'll learn it from this man.”

“Nah Lizzie Bee, I never hoped for this, never thought I was allowed.” He lays Lizzie down on her back in the crib and pulls the purple blanket up over her, her arms stretch out as if to stop herself from falling for a fraction of a second but then she settles. He feels Natasha approach them. He whispers, “But your Mama she works miracles.”

“You should kiss me now, Barton.”

“Ma’am, it would be my genuine pleasure."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> маленькая девочка = little girl  
> лепетать = babble (verb)
> 
> DVD extras are included look for the underlining for links :) I have no idea if any of you are enjoying them or not. If you click on the Cyrillic text you'll get google translate to say the words out loud for you. Discover the others at your leisure. 
> 
> This chapter is for Adrienne who was the first to comment on the last chapter. Thank you all once again for your lovely comments.. the next chapter is going to be fun :)


	17. Wade Wilson

 

                                                                                     

 

> Heya baby, it’s me your friendly neighborhood [mercenary](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SelfDemonstrating/Deadpool). Don’t worry, I only kill people who need killing or if I really need to work on some daddy issues or if it’s Wednesday. Wednesdays are bad for me. I’m sure you’ve heard of me, I’m the best superhero in the world after all. And still not one of those Avenger money earning heroes invited me to the baby shower, so I invited myself. I hereby present you with this slightly warm, but easy to reheat, chimichanga as a sign of my undying
> 
>                                                           
> 
> [affection](http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/File:Deadpool_and_his_Little_Yellow_Boxes.jpg).
> 
> So kiddo, what do they call ya? Hmm, what you don’t talk? How about I call you [Bea](http://regeneratormag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/deadpool-bea-arthur.png) Arthur and when you grow up maybe you can let me know if you feel more like a Bea or an Arthur.
> 
>                                                                                                                        
> 
> Did they just leave you in here, all alone, the big bad world just waiting to steal your [chimichangas?](https://kitchenoverlord.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/deadpool-cooking.jpg) Sensual [Archer](http://36.media.tumblr.com/cd66de16b0e8dc04672eab186cb4d673/tumblr_nf1htatUFN1rsus6so1_500.jpg) Man and Scary Spy Lady what were you thinking? Any fourth wall breaking regenerating degenerate could hand wave his way in here and take you out for a little black ops mission.
> 
> Oooooh you’re good at blowing bubbles with your spit. I do that too but no one can tell how awesome it looks and it just gets the inside of my mask wet. I like you kid. Here let’s just pick you up and…
> 
>                                                                
> 
> Weird.
> 
>                                                      
> 
>                                         
> 
>                                                                                         
> 
>  
> 
>         Third times a charm.
> 
>  
> 
> **THUNK**
> 
> **THUNK**
> 
>  
> 
> **THUNK**
> 
>  
> 
> “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY KID!!!”
> 
>  
> 
> “Deadpool?! What the Fuck?! How in the hell did you?!”
> 
>  
> 
>                                                                                                                        
> 
>                                                          
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
> 
>                                                                                                                                                                                                    

                                                                                                                                                                      

 

                                                                                                                                                                      

 

                                                                                                                                                                     

 

> “Right. Yeah, Yeah. Okay, I'll Help. You are so fuckin’ lucky Natasha is in the gym and not here to take you apart bit by bit.”
> 
> **SUUUCKPOP**
> 
> "I've seen her comics, I don't think I'd enjoy that as much as I want to. And I would want to."
> 
> "I don't have time for an order of crazy, Deadpool.  The Widow's gonna be back in less than half an hour.  How and why are you here fucking with my child's crib?!"
> 
> "Can't Uncle Pooley make a visit?"
> 
> "OUT NOW or I swear I'm calling [Doreen](http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Doreen_Green_\(Earth-616\))!"
> 
> "I'm taking back the chimichanga."
> 
> "Good."
> 
> "You would have been more entertained if this was fan art."
> 
> "No one knows what the fuck you are talking about. OUT!"  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello dearest readers and commenters, 
> 
> Sorry this one took so long. I hope the effort to put in the images makes up for it. This chapter is really just a bit of fourth wall breaking silliness but we will get back to the fluff soon. As per usual this chapter goes out to Discordchick who was the first to comment on the last chapter. It's also for you H who wanted a Deadpool chapter... I hope I did him justice.
> 
> Your DVD extras are a link to explain who Doreen is among other things. 
> 
> Hope you are all massively wonderfully well. 
> 
> x


	18. Maria Hill

She would have rather done this in her office, Stark’s Avengers entertaining suite, the gym, a coffee shop, anywhere. She would have rather been in neutral territory handing over these documents, discussing the inconvenient presence of a child well away from that child. Instead she is in the rooms that Tony Stark has handed over so willingly to her former Agents and they are staring her down with the force of people who know they no longer take orders from her.

Barton pats the child as she sleeps on his shoulder, a cloud of reddish fine hair pressed against his cheek. Romanoff is seated next to him at the table, her own hair, a darker version of the child’s, tumbles down around her face.

“There are three sets of identification,” Maria says drawing three folders from the satchel by her feet, “detailed histories for five years back for you and Barton and less detailed for ten.”

Natasha reaches across the table pulling the first folder open. Three passports, birth certificates, social security numbers and personal histories to learn and discard. She reads the names from the birth certificates first.  

“Nika and Elena Rykova,” she says tracing the names on the Russian and American documentation, “Rohan Francis.”

“Should you need to split up those histories don’t tie Barton to the child,” Maria says as Natasha looks up.

“Russian names.” Her voice is flat.

“You know Russian as well as you know American,” Barton says and rolls his eyes anticipating Natasha’s response, “You know what I mean. You’re always telling me it isn’t just language, it’s culture. Lizzie’s gonna learn the language fast enough from her mom…” Natasha’s body turns slightly as he speaks, she moves towards him in a way she never does for other people. Barton shrugs again, “Makes sense.”

“Nellie and Caleb Brennan parents to Olivia Brennan?” Natasha reads from the next folder. She frowns as she names the child.

“Guess Livvy is close to Lizzie,” Barton says unfazed, adjusting the child on his shoulder.

She slides the final folder across the table, “These are papers for Benjamin Cross and his daughter Edith Cross.” Maria extracts the birth certificate for Natasha’s cover, “This is Sarah McMillian.”

Natasha folds her arms upon the table. She looks as though she would wrap them around herself if she were any other woman. “Identities that don’t tie me to Elizabeth.” Her head is tilted down, even as she looks back to Maria through her eyelashes.

Barton actually loses color. He looks back to Natasha and then to Maria with such speed that he jostles the sleeping child. “No, Maria,” he insists, “Natasha stays with Lizzie.”

His mouth tightens. Maria can’t believe him. Barton honestly believed that he could keep mother and child together regardless. She tries to keep her expression impassive as he leans forward an unspoken threat beginning to form in his body language. She wants to tell him how this ridiculous optimistic approach to the future, this belief that sheer will can make something safe and good, is the very reason he has a small, fragile dependent now.

“Clint,” Romanoff says suddenly. Her voice is low and she leans down over her own crossed arms very slightly.

Barton is instantly distracted by her voice. “There is no scenario where you don’t stay with your daughter!”

The baby in his arms begins to struggle. A kind of panic passes over his face that Maria has never seen before, not in the field, not when faced with aliens or Hydra not even when faced with the fury of, well, Fury.

“There is Clint,” Natasha reiterates firmly and then turns holding out her arms for the baby.  

“Tasha,” he whispers. He is frozen, she thinks, stuck with the child grumbling in his arms. Barton looks unable to yield. He has ever been the more emotional, impulsive, down right stupid of the two of them yet it is a surprise that he appears so blindsided not by his possible separation from the child but by hers.

Natasha reaches gently towards the baby smoothing the downy hair on her forehead and offers a small smile to Barton, “But she will be with her father.”  

Barton frowns again but is no longer stuck he passes Natasha the child as he says her name, “Natasha.”

It never occurred to her before, never occurred to her to look for it, but these names, pet names, nicknames he uses are a code between them. She is Nat in the field when things are under control or when others are listening, she is Tasha when she needs him or he needs her and Natasha when truth must be accepted. She’s heard him call her Red and Romanoff in play and banter but she is very rarely the Black Widow to him.

Romanoff’s nicknames for him have a less obvious patterns and Maria can’t help but wonder if it is lacking because of Romanoff’s penchant for distance or because she is smarter at covering her tracks than Barton.

The way Natasha looks at her child now, allowing the baby to suck on her finger and gently bouncing her knee beneath the table, Maria wonders if the distant, cold Agent Romanoff was just another cover for the Russian.

“Clint,” Natasha says but looks across at Maria, “these are second, third, seventy sixth escape plans.” She gives a minute nod to Maria and Maria finds herself returning it, “This is for Elizabeth.”

Barton sighs and then with his long index finger drags a document toward him, “Edith. That was my mother’s name.”

“Histories are easier to remember when there is an element of truth,” Natasha says, “You know that.”

“Yeah I just… it’s a little more real now.”

He lets his hand drop beneath the table’s surface again, Maria is certain that Natasha takes it with her free hand.

“There is one final piece of paper work,” she says feeling even more aware of her surroundings. There is a baby blanket thrown over the lounge, bottles lined up in a drying rack and a book made out of soft fabric with a cartoon apple on its front intermingling with birth certificates, bank statements and out of state driver’s licences.

“More?” Barton asks, sounding tired.

“A true birth certificate,” she says and Barton’s forehead creases. She strongly suspects Romanoff has not discussed this request with him. “Does the child have a middle name?” she asks quickly, she’d rather be back at her desk or perhaps caught in Stark’s lab during a failed experiment than here if Strike Team Delta decided to have an argument.

“I…” Barton says. Stunned is good, stunned is better than angry or possessive or crazy. “Tash?” he asks.

“Russians have patronymics not middle names,” Natasha answers without looking at him.

“Barton’s not Russian.”

“Neither is Nat anymore,” Barton says switching his gaze from Natasha back to her.

“And yet,” Natasha says finding a driver’s licence from Minnesota in the loose collection of falsified documentation, “Here we see Nika and Elena.” She smiles a wry smile at her own image on the licence for Nika Mikhailovna Rykova.

“She should have something Russian,” Barton says as though he is thinking out loud. “Something other than her mother talking about me behind my back.” Maria catches a fleeting grin that passes across Natasha’s face.

Barton turns to Natasha his eyes focussing in on her. When Natasha nods she realizes he’d been waiting for permission. “Anastasia,” he says.

“Anastasia Romanova… the lost princess?” Maria can’t help but ask.

“It means resurrection,” Natasha answers for him, her green eyes flash as she looks up from her child.

“Elizabeth Anastasia?” Maria asks.

“Romanoff,” Barton says.

“Romanoff Barton.” Natasha says.  

Maria tries to ignore the smile that is suddenly fixed on Barton’s face. “Elizabeth Anastasia Romanoff Barton,” she reads as she types it into her pad. Beneath the English text she brings up a Cyrillic key pad and enters Елизавета Анастасия клинтоновна Романова, “When this is logged, the government, the world will know of her existence.”

Barton is tapping his finger against the child’s nose when she looks up again. The child has Barton’s eyes. He blinks and then slowly he says, “She can’t be hidden forever.”

Natasha looks at him, a furrow forming between her eyebrows, “She won’t be a shadow.”

“No Tasha,” he replies as though he could make reality bend to his will. “Our little girl’s gonna be as bright as the damn sun. No one’s gonna make her a shadow.”

She had many names when he was sent out to neutralize her, the Red Death, the Black Widow, Tsarina and the Slavic Shadow. Maria remembers the reports, for all her names, for all the ways she could mould herself into the shape of a thousand different women, those reports had never been able to track down evidence of a real name or an original identity.  

Maria stands leaving the documentation on the table for Barton and Romanoff to secure and perhaps come to terms with. “I will assume that you are pursuing other avenues for further documentation,” she says primarily to Natasha. “These identities are buried deep but they are known by myself, Stark, the Avengers and they can be accessed by JARVIS.”

“I understand,” Natasha says.

“Neither I nor anyone else here will know of any other documentation you may or may not have.”

“Understood,” Barton says and in that moment he is Agent Barton again.

“Finally, do you intend on remaining with the Avengers?”

“Yes,” Barton says. Romanoff beside him does not flinch, she seems content to let her partner do the talking.

“I take it this means you will not be assigned missions together.”

“Tash stays with Lizzie,” he says again and then he allows, “for now.”

“For now,” Romanoff agrees, “When things change we will inform the team.”

“And if you are needed?”

Barton huffs, “We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it, Maria.”

Burn it will, Barton, she thinks. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wlk68 this chapters for you because Discordchick can't have every chapter. So there you go Lizzie has a middle name and it's Russian because... well because Clint is getting sentimental in his old age. 
> 
> If you wanted to read the Cyrillic but it gives you a headache her name in Russian, for I suppose dual passport reasons or something, would sound like this Yelizaveta Anastasiya klintonovna Romanova (I did not write this in IPA because if Cyrillic bums you out IPA will bum you so much :)) In the Russian form she looses the double barrel surname because it includes the patronymic Clintonovna much like Natasha's name prior to defecting was Natalia Alianovna Romanova indicating her fathers name had been Alian. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this interlude and have lots of ideas about whose POV should be next.


	19. Kate Bishop

In the entrance to Avengers Tower there are metal detectors and x-ray machines but first you have to speak to a middle aged man in a dark suit and a frown. Kate is almost certain that the middle aged man in the dark suit and the frown does more to deter people than the security. Kate does up another button on her blueberry coat and smiles as she approaches. There is absolutely no reason why she should not be here. She is Kate Bishop, a Hawkeye and rich. Honestly the Avengers should be happy she is paying them a visit at all, she is after all very busy and important.

“Please tell Mr Barton that Hawkeye is here to see him,” she says in her speaking to her father’s secretary’s voice.

Three of the CCTV cameras in the lobby turn at her voice and she can hear the faint whirl of lenses refocusing to get a clear shot of her. She knows that the small part of her that wants to look up and pose is one she should quell.

The man looks up from his computer screen after a moment and looks a kind of self-satisfied that makes Kate want to say things like ‘Do you know who I am? his lips curl slightly as he says, “I’m sorry, Miss. I have no record of a Mr Barton.”

“Clint Barton? The lesser Hawkeye?”

“I’m sorry?” the man says as if she is absurd.

“You know what nevermind, I’ll call him,” she says searching for her cell phone in her handbag.

“Cell phones do not work in the lobby, Miss.”

“Of course they don’t,” she huffs, taking her handbag and the present that she lugged up here with her.

Her call is sent straight through to Clint’s voicemail. Even though she has heard it a thousand times the fact that she can hear him trying to disconnect the recording and his final quiet grunt before it allows her to respond never fails to irritate her. “Barton, answer your damn phone!”

“Miss?” she hears behind her. The middle aged man has left his desk and is looking a shade less self-satisfied.

“Bishop,” she answers raising herself up to her full height, “Katherine Bishop.”

“Miss Bishop, I’ve just been notified that a Hawkeye will coming to collect you from the lobby momentarily.”

For a man who works for someone who calls himself Iron Man this dude really needs to stop making that face when he says Hawkeye. At least our name is literary, Iron Man is, what, heavy metal?

“Oh,” Kate says and then quickly corrects, “Well of course. I will wait right here.”

It is very difficult in this day and age to look busy and important when you cannot use your cell phone. It is very difficult to look busy and important while waiting for Clint Barton because the man cannot be prompt for anything.

“You don’t answer your phone,” she says when he exits the elevator.

He shrugs indicating at least that his aids are in place, “Battery’s dead.”

“You are such an incompetent adult, Barton.”

“Respect your elders, kid,” Clint says but he smirks a little in among the grumpy, haven’t slept, general mooshed into the pavement look on his face.

“Earn it, old man.”

“Why are you here, Kate?”

“You said I could come see the …” she says and then drops her voice, “you know.”

“You could have called first.”

She rolls her eyes at this. “When you learn how to keep a cell phone charged I’ll call ahead. How’d you know I was here anyway?” She thumbs at the gate keeper behind the sleek marble desk. “Door dude was all like, Barton? Never heard of him. Hawkeye? Get out of here with your crazy talk.”

“JARVIS,” Clint says looking up at the ceiling, “Say hi to Katie, she’s my protégé.”

Katie and protégé all in one annoying sentence, boy, was he asking for a kicking.

“Miss Bishop,” a disembodied British voice answers, “Welcome to Avengers Tower.”

“Hello JARVIS, thanks for the assist,” she says finding herself scanning the ceiling for whatever Clint was talking to, “Not his protégé.”

“Too late, it’s in the files now,” Clint chuckles.

She pouts before she says, “Show me the ‘you know what’ now.” She punctuates this with her hands on her hips because a TED talk told her this would help. “I brought presents and everything.”

“Kid’s name is Lizzie,” Clint says leading her past security. He flashes a key card and no one bothers to search her, ultimately that is a good thing because there is a Taser that looks like lipstick in her bag and the present she did buy for the littlest Barton isn’t one that she could get past TSA, “No one’s bought me presents in my whole life, Lizzie’s here like eight weeks and already she’s sitting on a horde of stuff.”

“Bet she’s a damn sight prettier than you too,” Kate says happily. Clint and his nicknames, she can’t see Natasha Romanoff naming her child Lizzie just as she isn’t a Katie and Natasha isn’t a Tasha to anyone else but him.

“True. So true,” Clint muses and then scrubs at his face like he has only noticed it in the reflection of the elevator doors.

Clint opens a suite and Natasha Romanoff’s easily identifiable red hair comes into view over the top of the couch. “Hawkeye,” she greets her.

“Natasha,” Kate says feeling suddenly a lot stiffer and awkward. Clint’s ‘not my girlfriend’, work wife, partner, scary spy friend has always intimidated her. “I’d ask how you are and stuff…” she says, “but you know I’m here for proof that Barton really has a kid.” And even if you hadn’t just had a baby with him, I’m not sure I’d ever ask you how you were and expect a straight answer, she doesn’t say.

“He does,” Natasha answers as though Kate had just asked if Barton owned an arrow with a [USB](https://41.media.tumblr.com/a28eb58c5ae70ce0fda0e6104b6df7f9/tumblr_nkr86rNdaS1sk59o3o1_500.png) attached. Her gaze is focused on something on the floor “Currently she is unhappy that she is expected to spend time on her stomach.”

Clint starts to push her forward and then around the couch. She stops, leaning back into Clint’s shove and there on the floor in the middle of a spongy looking patchwork blanket is a small child. Tiny hands making small fists and legs splayed behind her, she struggles to lift her head but when she does her face frowns deeply as if she was experiencing the most dissatisfying moment of anyone’s life in all of history.

“Hawkeye, she makes your dumpster face!”

“I do not make that face,” Clint grumps but Kate can see Natasha smirk.

The baby has tufts of reddish hair and chubby arms and legs.

“Can I interrupt tummy time to hold her?” Kate asks the only adult in the room, Natasha.

Natasha sits barefoot on the couch, her head tilts a little as she answers. She has not taken her eyes off the baby in the entire time Kate has been here. “If Elizabeth had the words I’m sure she’d say yes.”

So the baby is Elizabeth to Natasha Romanoff and probably a series of ridiculous nicknames to Clint Barton.

Kate crouches down leaving her bag and the inelegantly wrapped present by the couch.

“Hello little one,” she says as gently as she can. She picks her up trying to remember babysitting skills from the few months she spent insisting she could earn her own money when she was thirteen.

“You look like your mommy,” she says, looking down at the little girl who is no longer making Clint’s dumpster face. She does look like Natasha, in so much as she has red hair and full pink lips but there is something Clint like in the sharp blueness of her eyes. It really is true, Clint Barton has a daughter. “Aren’t you a lucky one? Oh. Oh. What did I do?” she says as a furrow forms between the baby’s eyebrows and with a soft hiccoughing sob the baby starts to cry.

“You’re not the right Hawkeye, kiddo,” Clint says and lifts the squalling child out of her arms. The baby comes to rest against his chest and then like a car alarm being switched off the crying stops.

“How did he do that?” she asks, her eyebrows raising to her hairline. Natasha Romanoff merely gives a one shoulder shrug and looks unimpressed. “No seriously, he can’t cross the road without getting hit by a car.”

“I suspect it was all an act. One he had to drop when something more important came along.”

“Lizzie Bee, this girl is not to be trusted,” Clint says to his daughter and Kate silently congratulates herself on the ridiculous nickname supposition, “She says nothin’ but lies and slander. Your Daddy has always been amazing.”

“Woman,” Kate corrects and is obviously ignored by Barton, “Okay so Baby Barton.”

“Romanoff Barton,” Clint insists.

“Baby Romanoff Barton, right. I got you a baby [bow](http://cache3.asset-cache.net/gc/125217134-kenya-masai-mara-safari-guide-salaash-ole-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=vKvxHVoyEI8dcqIRRqqKSRZBMUDnDuZPnWNVdXuAZ8xA4sNpXpHqciRvhkVrjBgGGhAl3iRJIlxIt3u0SSe%2Bbw%3D%3D) and arrows.” She gestures to the package by her bag and then to Natasha she adds, “I tried to get baby knives but would you believe it, they are not appropriate for children.”

“Little do they know,” Natasha says without expression and she is utterly terrifying.

“These are for a six to eight year old but you’ll grow into them, won’t you?” Kate says refocusing on the baby in Barton’s arms.

“[Boomerang](http://40.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mck776Iul11rwk3plo1_500.png) arrows?” he asks as he makes a little circle with his pacing. His expression is stupidly hopeful.

“No boomerang arrows, Hawkeye.”

“Aw,” he says.

“Thank you, Kate,” Natasha says from the couch and Kate feels like she has passed some kind of test.

“Yeah, Hawkeye,” Clint agrees.

Elizabeth Romanoff Barton looks intensely at her own fist and purses her lips, Kate just watches feeling gobsmacked. “Wow. I just… Barton’s car crash of a life helped to make this?”

An annoyed expression passes quickly over Clint’s face before he say, “Nat did all of the work. I showed up at the last minute.”

“You’re good at that,” Kate agrees.

Clint’s eyes are only for his daughter now and Kate catches him whispering into her chubby little grip, “Gonna be here for all the minutes now Lizzie Bee… all of them.”

Natasha rises from the couch, “Would you like a coffee, Kate? I believe we have some kind of cake.”

“Yeah sure,” she says after a few dumbfounded moments of watching Clint bouncing the baby in his arms and whispering to her. She begins to follow Natasha trying to tear her eyes from Clint and the baby Elizabeth, “Sorry. I thought I knew what I was going to see when I got here.”

“Don’t feed her!” Clint says abruptly, “She’s a Hawkeye, she’ll keep coming back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter is for Pear Bear who had not commented before, thank you so much for commenting! I promised that we would get Kate meeting the baby Romanoff Barton she was so keen to meet. Here it is the calm before the storm. DVD extras included :) love you all


	20. Steve Rogers

He heard her come in. She wasn’t trying to be stealthy nor was he trying to ignore her. It wasn’t like he didn’t know she was there but when he stops for water with one final left hook, she is on the mats stretching out her limbs more like a chorus girl than a fighter. Baby Elizabeth is watching from a tiny chair that bounces when she moves. She follows her mother’s movements with her eyes and pushes her chin back and flails her little arms to make the chair move.

Natasha lifts up from her center, a deep arch in her back and her head falling backwards. Her hair, though tied back, dragging on the mats. Her baby squeals but Steve isn’t sure it’s for the feat of acrobatics Natasha performs or for the fact that she has managed to bounce herself yet again. A little control must be a heady thing for someone so small.

Natasha comes to a standing position from the arch and he can see the way she smiles at the baby. He has never seen one of her real smiles not look tinged with sadness. This time though she smiles quickly, brightly and truly. Baby Elizabeth bounces and squeals again.

Natasha cartwheels away across the mat. She stops just before the mat ends on the corner opposite him. He starts unstrapping his hands, he can be done for the day.

On her hands she is perfectly still for ten, fifteen seconds, her legs part, splits. She tumbles again and then is upright.

He gestures to baby Elizabeth when she looks up at him, “When I was a kid all the apartments had baby carriages out the front with babies just sitting in the sun.”

“Crying in the sun.”

“Some,” he smiles, “There was always other kids around though, someone’s mother, older sister.” He can see it now, hand me downs, hand knitted bonnets and the squeaky sound that the springs would make when they were rolled over uneven surfaces and they were all uneven.

“She’ll never sit in the sun alone,” Natasha says looking back at her daughter.

“No. I guess she won’t,” he says pulling the last of the tape free, “No mumps or measles or polio though right?”

“Not if we can help it.”

“If it was up to you and Barton alone I’d say nothing was ever going to touch her.”

“But it isn’t just up to us.”

His mother was a nurse, he remembers late nights when the fog was coming in and his chest wouldn’t clear, sitting up right, every breath coming out a painful wheeze. Without fail on those nights there would always be an urgent knock at their door a frantic parent begging for Mrs Rogers to come.

Sarah Rogers always went. Until one day she couldn’t anymore. They had medicines now, screenings to find the thing that killed her and then kill it in return.

“No. It never is,” Steve agrees quietly. She smiles one of her sadder smiles and sinks down into the spilts. He looks up at the three television screens along the far wall for a moment he catches a glimpse of himself in uniform before he is suddenly hidden behind the blurry green mass of the Hulk. “We’re on the television again,” he points up at the screens, “Why does Tony insist in having those things on in here?”

Natasha smirks as she turns to examine the screens from her position on the floor, “Doesn’t he realize you like to be alone when you are punching out all your demons?” She bend at the hips her forehead resting easily against her shin.

“You know what Romanoff…” he shakes his head but then from the corner of his eye he sees the words trailing across the screen beneath the generically attractive anchor, “JARVIS can you turn up the volume?”

Over the cacophony of the vowel sounds the happy baby makes from her corner of the mats, the anchor continues,“… say the infant’s birth was registered three days ago under the name Elizabeth Anastasia Romanoff Barton.” Natasha sits up right and he is looking at her for the moment she rolls her eyes at the way the anchor pronounces Anastasia.

“There had been speculation that Natasha Romanoff, code name Black Widow and one of the founding members of the now vigilante peace keeping force known as the Avengers…” They play footage of the congressional hearings he was gratefully unable to attend, with Natasha, an arrow at her throat and a sneer on her lips.

“…was in a relationship with one of her team mates. Speculation mainly centred on Captain Steve Rogers.” It is then his turn to roll his eyes. “We now go to Peter Stefanovic outside Avengers Tower.”

“It begins,” she sighs.

He sits back down on the bench, “Stark’s going to be annoyed you didn’t go with Illya.” He tries to smile but he feels his face not quite achieving the sincerity of the movement. She’s right he is a terrible liar.

“Why does he keep suggesting masculine names?” she asks but though her tone is light she carefully lifts her baby from her bouncing seat.

“My guess?” he shrugs, “They were the spies that got actual names in the television shows he watched. I assume you had a plan for when this…” He tries to bite through the instinct that tells him he shouldn’t swear in front of a lady. Bucky, the Commandos, sure but a lady even one as sharp as Natasha it just feels wrong. Peggy would definitely shoot at him again for that.

“Hit the fan?” she finishes for him and he is pretty sure she’s only doing it out of pity.

“Exactly,” he smiles back.

“I had a plan,” she says looking down at the little girl in her arms. There is something a little bitter in the way she says it. No, not quite bitter more rueful. “It seems now I plan in concert.”

“But you and Barton?”

“Are partners,” she answers but it seems she is talking more to the baby than to him. Natasha doesn’t change her tone for Elizabeth, she speaks Russian and English with the same intonation and patterns as when she speaks to Barton. The baby’s eyes focus in on her just as quickly as on her father when she hears his voice and the lyrical up and down he picks up whenever he is speaking just to her.

“Right. I thought you two…” had a shared history, knew each other’s moves, didn’t do anything without considering the other. I thought, he doesn’t say, Barton was your Bucky. “You always seemed pretty in concert to me.”

She looks up at him then. Her eyes narrow a little as if she is asking what it was that he just left out. He lets himself relax and reminds himself that she isn’t actually interrogating him.

She licks her bottom lip before she answers, “It is one thing to be and another thing to know you will never not be.”

He nods, “One truth forever and ever.”

“An easy way to die,” she says raising an eyebrow.

“But what a way to live.”

She turns back to the screens as the dark haired reporter continues from across the street. “If the child’s name and birth certificate are to be believed the child’s father is Clinton Barton code name Hawkeye, former SHIELD agent. No reputable sources have been able to produce photos of Romanoff or Barton since the fall of SHIELD and the following congressional hearings, however she is…”

He blows a regretful breath from his nose, “And you told them they’d know where to find you.”

“There are at least three major network vans out the front of the tower and you still think that was a lie?” she answers without turning back to him. Her eyes are focussed on the three screens. The other news agencies have picked up the story.

“The Avengers, Stark Industries and the Maria Stark Foundation have yet to comment. Back to you in the Studio.”

“JARVIS, turn it off,” Natasha says.

“Of course, Ms Romanoff,” JARVIS replies politely and all three screens flash into blackness.

“Do you want the Avengers to comment?” he asks standing behind her. She doesn’t turn around straight away. He watches as her shoulders roll back towards him under the surface of her exercise shirt.

“I didn’t think I was calling those shots, Captain,” she says finally.

He frowns, “You’re part of my team, so is Barton but Elizabeth isn’t an Avenger and I don’t make it my job to comment on people’s relationships.” She tilts her head at this and he continues, “We don’t have bylaws. This isn’t Avenger business.”

“How diplomatic of you,” she says. She smiles and it is a very good fabrication of a real smile but there is just something off about her eyes.

“You know,” he sighs, letting his hands fall from his hips and realizing he cannot remember putting them there. “I think I’d like for diplomacy to work for once.”

“It isn’t only my decision to make,” she says firmly. Her hand is cupped against the baby’s soft orange hair.

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, “talk to Barton. The news reels can cool their heels.”

“News reels?” she smirks. The smirks are almost always real he notes. She flicks her hair slightly as she turns, “Now you’re just playing with us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter goes out to Kiss_me_cassie. I hope you enjoyed a little of the start of the storm and, of course, of Steve's point of view. I love hearing what you all think, so even if you want to argue about some finer point of marvel lore or point out my spelling mistakes please don't hold back. I get bored so easily :) Love you all new chapter up soon.


	21. Tony Stark

Tony picks up the arrow and tests its weight. Barton walks back from the target, he spins an arrow between his fingers before dropping it back into his hip quiver. He rubs the ridge of his knuckles under his nose before he speaks, “Stark, I’m tellin’ ya the flight is off on these arrows.”

“Maybe you’re just not as good as you think you are.”

“Oh, I am that good.” Barton’s long fingers are scratching at a spot under the sleeve of his t-shirt. He is annoyingly too comfortable making the claim, doesn’t he realize there is only room for one person with that level of cockiness and Tony was here first. Then his voice drops, “Uncle Tony.”

“How do you two make that sound like a threat?” he asks.  

Barton’s head cocks to the side and his chin wrinkles as he forces his bottom lip upwards like his actually thinking about an answer. “Training,” he says after a moment in the same low, ‘I could kill you without blinking’ voice and the goofy, ‘don’t look at me, I’m just one of those good ol’ boys you see pounding brewskies at the local’ facial expression fades away.

Tony doesn’t flinch but for maybe a second he feels himself working a little harder than he wants to at not flinching.

Then Barton grins.

Tony lets out his breath and ignores Barton’s dry chuckle. “Well, I’m telling you there is no way it’s my design that’s the problem.” To illustrate he holds up the new arrow and lets it balance on the back of his index finger. Barton barely looks at the arrow, steady across his knuckle. He just shrugs and turns back to the target.

Barton picks up his bow and in a literal flash his has selected an arrow and drawn, “My arrows….”

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

Three purple fletched arrows hit the target 160 feet back. They are grouped so tightly and so dead on it looks more like a purple rose floating out in space than arrows in a bullseye. Damn, he is that good.

Barton barely pauses to grab one of the new arrows from the bench, “Your new arrows…”

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

The space between the snap of the bow string and the heavy sound of metal tip hitting the layers of padding behind the target is infinitesimal.

His new arrows, black nocks and fletchings, are all over the target and none of them in the center. Barton turns to him, his elevated eyebrows creasing his brow.

Tony pulls his hand away from his chin and gestures to the target, “You could have shot wide.”

“Stark,” Barton says and the ‘c’mon’ is implied.

“Okay. Okay Natty Bumppo,” he says and Barton barely manages a head shake. Tony is 96% certain he is trying not react to the nicknames in the hope it will get him to quit it. It won’t work. At a certain point it crosses from unfunny to funny again, at least to Tony. “What are you saying is the problem?” 

It’s mechanics, physics, it’s an error to be fixed. The world shrinks for an instant down to the arrow in Barton’s hand and the numbers it represents. Numbers he can change, fix, improve. It shrinks to numbers he can control.

“Don’t mean to interrupt, boys,” the voice at the doorway says.

JARVIS really needs to stop letting Romanoff sneak up on him.

“But you’re going to anyway?” he says, unscrewing the discreet canister built into the arrow shaft.

Romanoff doesn’t come any closer nor does she seem to care he hasn’t turned to look at her, “By all means, Mr Stark, continue having your engineering degree handed to you by a two bit carnie. Elizabeth and I can wait.”

Well that’s interesting. Not the stuff about his engineering degree that’s so ridiculous it barely registers but carnie, so the circus history is actually true.

He looks up at Barton, slinging his bow across his chest like it’s a backpack rather than a weapon. “Carnie? So it’s true, not some fiction Fury inserted into your file to root out moles?”

Barton looks back over his shoulder to Romanoff. He smiles and then looks back to Tony, “I’ll do my act for you sometime. Nat would probably be happy to tie you to the spinning wheel.”

He wants to say something about the kinky shit they get up to in their own time staying there but he glances back at Natasha and her face is so devoid of any feeling despite the infant in her arms that the only word that comes out is, “Pass.”

The corner of her mouth lifts very slightly like she has won.

“Mr Barton, a word?” she says, her voice is deadly smooth even though she is wearing the kind of clothes upper west side women wear to yoga classes between buying pumpkin spice lattes

Barton lifts his chin once, “Of course, Ms Romanoff.”

He joins her and they begin the kind of hushed conversation that only serves to make you want to listen in.

“We knew it was coming,” Barton says after a sigh he runs his hand over his kid’s forehead and smiles but only at her.

Tony keeps his head down, examining the arrow shaft, running his fingertips over the joins looking for the error. He also keeps them in his peripheral vision. Privacy is something they’ve always ignored. Romanoff didn’t give a shit about his privacy when she triple agented him why should he give a shit about theirs now.

“Today it came,” Romanoff says, “Rogers wants to know if we want the Avengers to make a comment.”

Barton looks up at Natasha at that, his hand comes off the baby in her arms and he gives her the calculating look he gets before he draws an arrow. “I don’t know, Tash. I mean it’s not like they started a breeding program for Avengers…” he shrugs. “We just, you know, had a kid. I don’t see why it’s anyone’s business but ours.”

“I know you are listening, Tony.” She looks straight at him, eerily still.

He shrugs a little as he looks up, “In my defence you are in my house right now.”

"You did put our names on it."

He frowns, slightly. Then nods his acquiescence.

Natasha, Barton and the baby all stare back at him. Unhelpful and unyielding as always. He throws his hand out it front of him,"As the Superhero with the most experience dealing with bad press, I’m going to go on the record and say you need to get out in front of this."

Barton makes a low growling sound in the back of his throat, "Lizzie isn’t bad press. She’s a baby girl."

He rocks back on his heels. The guy actually growls. Who growls at people? His mouth opens a fraction and he feels the divot between his eyebrows growing deeper.

"Hey Barton, have you met the international media?” he asks facetiously, “I have. They don’t give two fucks and everything can be made into bad press. I’m calling Pepper.” He pulls his cell from his back pocket.

“Pepper?” Barton repeats but mostly to Natasha.

Tony answers him anyway, “She’s not just a pretty face.”

“She’s been handling your messes for years,” Natasha allows and Tony looks up at her from his cells screen. He raises an eyebrow, does she really expect him to feel bad about that? He’s done a lot worse that he’s been trying to make right.

“Her and a crack team of PR, Ex SHIELD and world class security,” Tony counts off on his fingers. He shakes his head, steps forward again. “Look, follow the Captain into battle but trust me when I say those rabid pitbulls would rip him apart.” He thumbs towards the city street where he knows the television crews will have set up their packs.

He stares at Barton, the man looks back with a cool look of incredulity.

Tony snorts in disbelief, “It’s nuts that you can’t see this. You can’t be this naïve?! Romanoff, I know you can see this.”

“He’s right,” Natasha says and Barton switches his gaze back to her instantly.

“Wow. Really? Tasha?”

“Call Pepper,” Natasha says, her voice even and her eyes on Barton, “We’ll talk to her.”

He steps forward again, “Barton, listen to your…”

“Stark!” Barton yells and the baby flinches and begins to cry “Stop talking!”

“Clint,” Natasha says under the sound of the baby. Tony can’t hear her well but he watches the way Barton watches her mouth when she talks.

“Yeah, Tash, we do it your way.” Barton reaches for the kid, murmuring and smoothing her fuzzy orange hair down, “I’m gonna take Lizzie back to…”

“Go,” she says with a short sharp nod. He drags the crying baby from her arms and stalks out of the room.

The sound of the kids crying is settled quickly. Natasha doesn’t watch him leave, doesn’t move from her spot. “Make your call. We will meet with whomever she wants.”

“You want to get Banner to sedate your boyfriend first?” he says his mouth betraying him by pulling up into a nervous smile.

“Make the call, Stark.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey fantastic readers of fluffy nothingness, 
> 
> This chapter is for Stephaniegk. Thank you so much for all the support. Everyone who has commented so far has been awesome and the reason I continue to write. I will continue to try and answer every question you might have and really do listen to every suggestion. Biggest hugs to all of you.


	22. Natasha Romanoff

She toes off her running shoes and socks as soon as she enters the suite, pushing her toes into the soft carpeting to ground herself before confronting Clint. She can hear him humming in the bedroom, a low rumble of sound through the still open door.

She watches him for a moment, hovering over their bed, t-shirt pulled tight across his back. He is changing Elizabeth’s diaper, his fingers pressing down tabs and a balled up used diaper on the floor near his feet.

“Hawkeye,” she says when she is close enough and then she raps the side of her foot against the base of the doorway.

“Mmm?” he replies lifting Elizabeth back into his arms and kicking the diaper ball towards the pail at the entrance to the ensuite. “She’s gonna be hungry soon.”

Her eyebrows raise as she notes how careful he is to avoid making eye contact, “Are you going to tell me what that was about?”

“Lizzie was crying, Stark was annoying me.”

“That simple.”

“Yeah, that simple,” he says walking away from her towards the crib.

She narrows her eyes, “Liar.”

He looks back at her, over his shoulder, his eyes are cold and hardened and his face has lost all expression. He puts Elizabeth down, knocking the mobile Banner gave them, by accident or design. He turns back to her and in three strides is pushing her back out the bedroom door.

“Is that right,” his nostrils flare, “Widow?”

She halts. Her stance widens. Her lips part automatically as she looks up at him. She manages to stop the brief but hard intake of air that might give her away.

“You don’t lie to me. You don’t call me Widow.” She feels a slight twitch in her jaw as she speaks.

“Is that what you know?” he says, his voice a simmering upsurge.

“You know that I do.”  

“We’ll do whatever you want. I said that.” He moves to circle her, his forehead creased and his articulation overly crisp, “Just drop it.”

“No.”

He is heading into the kitchen, still refusing to look back at her. Natasha’s words bring him up short but he does not turn back to her, instead choosing to hunch down over the counter. “No?” he says sharply.

“I said I would try, you said you would try, for her sake,” Natasha says finding herself echoing the sentiments he has flung at her in many of their fights. “You are my partner in this. And for her sake I will not let you lie to me now.”

There is a timer in her head, counting down from the moment he put Elizabeth in her crib. She has an unerring accuracy with time, part of a skill set for survival and destruction that is now retrofitted for an infant’s comfort.

“Jesus, Tasha,” he says and crumples further into the counter.

“We knew it was coming,” she says softer than before.

“Yeah,” he agrees in a groan.

“You agreed that she should have a real name, a real history.”

“I know, Tash,” he says. “God. I know. That’s not it.” His hand is covering his mouth as though he was horrified as he twists back towards her.

“Then what?” she says. “I see the anger, the guilt.”  

“I love you, Natasha.” He throws his left hand forward, palm upwards, gesturing to her and the bedroom behind her. “I love Lizzie. I… I’d die for both of you.”

He sounds frantic. She swallows the impulse to tell him that love is for children.

She takes a step, “I will do everything to make certain that isn’t necessary.”

“Yeah,” he says and the loss of the frantic edge to his voice does nothing to raise her confidence. He sounds numb now and she knows she has misunderstood his point.

“Clint?”

“I know you can look after yourself, Tasha, I know that. But… But it’s different now. If it’s the choice between Lizzie having you or me? Well, I’ll make damn sure she still has you and…”

“Clint.”

“And I’d stand in front of an army…” he raises his eyebrows and nods his head, “Unarmed…” he nods again looking for confirmation that she understands, “Naked…” again he nods at her, the same clipped voice he uses in the field for orders, “For that little girl, I’d….” He shakes he head, not particularly hard just enough that she knows what comes next isn’t neatly thought out or prettily pieced together. When his eyes meet hers they are very blue, reflecting the color of his t-shirt. “I’d happily sit through the kinds of torture only fuckin’ Loki could think up if it meant you two were safe.”

“Tasha, fuck, there’s nothing I can do here. No one I can shoot, no cover I can give you.” He flings his hand forward again, almost recklessly, and then both hands bunch into fists. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he says lowly and she can tell even now he is trying to stop himself yelling with the baby so close by. “Pepper Potts is better at protecting you than I am. Stark can offer you both more safety than I can. I’m her daddy and I… they’re gonna make her out to be some kind of mistake…” his voice cracks, “a freak… something bad.”

“Clint,” she says coming closer, he squeezes his lips together breathing heavily.

“She’s my little girl. She’s not bad fucking press. I love you. That isn’t some fuckin’ scandal.”

“We need you, Clint.”

“No, you don’t,” he answers too quickly, his hand swiping at the back of his own neck.  

Elizabeth has done this to them. Before the little girl with his shrewd eyes none of this needed to be said. She is taking them to pieces and making them rebuild. The confidence they had in their old skills no longer seems to matter. The way they worked together, an instinctual dance, is falling apart in the face of her new demands. Sometimes Natasha looks at her tiny daughter and sees the pebble that begins the avalanche.

“You are her father and no one else will offer her the kind of love that you do. No one can teach her to hope like you will.”

Both his hands are in his hair when he cries out, “I fucked this up. I’m so outta my fucking depth.”

“Clint Barton, the world can say whatever it wants of us. I know the truth. Elizabeth is one of the few good things I have brought into this world and you helped me to do that. Long before she was even possible you were helping me to do that.”

“I just gave you a choice.”

“Yes.” She frowns. He is tall and athletically muscled, his fingers are dexterous and his aim astounding but his shoulders curl in as he turns his face away from her like her praise actively scares him. Clint Barton looks more like a boy than a killer. “And it was more valuable than you have ever given yourself credit for.”

“Tasha,” he whispers.

Maybe there was part of her that always thought his anger at her talk of debts and repayment was because he wanted to keep her indebted. If there was she was so very wrong.

“Pepper Potts doesn’t quiet Elizabeth in the middle of the night and Tony Stark doesn’t tell me I can be a mother even though I have no memory of my own,” she says and she is not sure she recognizes her own voice anymore. This is not them. The constant need to reassure each other is new and bitterly unwelcome. “None of those fools outside know what it is to depend on you to help them bring an infant into the world, alone in a small farm house, terrified…”

His eyes are swimming, less like he is about to cry and more like she has broken his nose or snapped him with a rubber band. It stings, she thinks, when I tell you you are more than the agent on my six, more than a bow and arrow, it stings.

“Tasha, I…”

She puts her hands to his cheeks dragging his face down towards her, “You did that. You never say… You know I’m scared… You never say it.”

“I’m scared too,” he closes his eyes.

“And you still hold me up. It is enough, Clint,” she drags in a breath, hearing it catch in her own throat, “You are enough.”

He shudders in her hands. She thinks that it might break her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is for Jenny, you rock!... sorry its a short one the next one should be longer. Thank you everyone for the continued support. Everyone of your comments and kudos and bookmarks have meant to world to me. Now I just have to put on a Pepper Potts brain and be ultra competent to write the next chapter (not sure I can be that competent. eeek. )


	23. Pepper Potts

“Aw man,” she can hear Barton complain from behind the closed door. Natasha sits calmly on the sectional sofa in a dress and heels that has Pepper trying to remember not to call her Natalie despite the small child sleeping on her back beneath a purple blanket.

“Is there something wrong?” Natasha calls, her red lips framing the words so precisely. Pepper couldn’t pull off that shade, with her fair skin and freckles she’d most probably look like a mascot for a large burger franchise.

“Nah,” he calls back through the door, “I agreed to the suit. I’ll shut up.”

Natasha pauses in the soft stroking of her child’s hair and smirks, “There’s a vest too, isn’t there?”

“Yeah.”

“The vest is the least of your worries.”

“But,” he says poking his head out of the door way, his hands hidden by the door frame but clearly busy with the business of buttoning a shirt, “you admit it is one.”

“[Помолчи](https://translate.google.com/?ie=UTF-8&hl=en&client=tw-ob#ru/en/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%87%D0%B8%2C%20%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%83%D0%B9%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0), пожалуйста,” Natasha admonishes though Pepper doesn’t understand the words it is clear Clint at least comprehends their essence. “Pepper, please go on.”

“According to Daniel you won’t be needed on camera very long, Mr Barton,” Pepper raises her voice to the man behind the door quickly correcting herself, “Clint.”

“Nat is better at talking than I am.”

“Natasha,” Natasha says, smiling in a way that makes Pepper uneasy, “is better at stopping her impulse to put an arrow through a journalist’s eye socket.”

Pepper feels her eyes grow a fraction larger. “Neither of you can be armed,” the words come out in a kind of hiccough and she recoils at the sound of her own discomfort.

“Pepper, we are joking,” Natasha says looking back at her. Her smile has lost the sharpness it had when she was directing her words to Barton.

She blinks quickly, “Right,” she gives a little nod and moves on, “The Avengers’ statement has been released and Stark Industries is taking no official position on…”

“’Cause tech conglomerates have historically needed to take positions on babies,” Barton interrupts exiting the bedroom with an end of the new tie flipped over one shoulder and a steel blue vest unbuttoned. The PR team’s choice of suit was appropriate but she is amazed at how closely they have managed to match the vest’s color to his eyes.

“Clint,” Natasha says as his fingers finish the knotting of his tie and smooth it back down across his shirt covered abdomen.

“I know. Sorry.” He shrugs and looks up for the first time. Even without the suit jacket and the vest unbuttoned Pepper can see how the farm boy come assassin they’ve been sharing a home with these last weeks could be a spy. He looks very suddenly like she wouldn’t have noticed him as out of place in a board room or a charity ball. “This isn’t your problem, Ms Potts.”

It takes her a moment to respond. This man is just as slippery as Natasha. They match. The silvery blues of his new suit and the navy blues of her dress. Natalie and whatever name he went by when ‘shadowing’ other people. Clothing shouldn’t be able to do that, shift your perceptions of someone so thoroughly. They were doing something extra, surely.

“Pepper,” she answers, “Tony and I are angry too. Sadly, we are more accustomed to it but we are angry too.”

“And we are very grateful,” Natasha looks up at Barton and gives him short nod before looking back to Pepper.

“Yeah,” he agrees.

“This is not something in our collective skill sets.”

Pepper feels the sway of her ponytail as she tilts her head frowning slightly, “Media relations?”

“Telling the media anything,” Barton answers in a low grumble. The vest he seemed to dislike so thoroughly is now buttoned over the dark tie and light shirt.

Natasha follows him, a lilt in her voice like this is a ‘bit’ they’ve worked out, “Having private lives for the media to be interested in.”

“The only people who knew my name,” Barton grins at her, his hand curving over the back of the sofa, “were SHIELD or shady people who did shady things.”

Pepper raises her eyebrows and adjusts her legs crossing them at the ankle and sweeping to the other side of her seat. “That sounds like the media to me.”

“We do this and then that’s it right? I mean we still have Hydra and Aliens and…” Barton sweeps his hand through the air make vague hand gestures she guesses are meant to mean superhero business and not paparazzi. He shrugs and then finishes hopelessly, “to worry about but…”

“The Avengers’ PR machine will decline to comment after this interview but…” she frowns as her smiles falters, “I’m sorry, I thought Daniel and Maria went through this all with you?”

She was only here for a quick check in before her day really started and the whirl wind of press conference, interview, life change picked up speed for the couple who Pepper was starting to think of as part of Tony’s adopted family. Some days she expected him to present her with a drunken aunt or a politely racist grandmother with super powers or a history of undermining governments.

The actual prep and work she’d delegated out to the best PR, media professionals and lawyers Stark Industries and now Avengers Inc had to offer. In real time that meant Daniel. Daniel appeared to be the antithesis of PR, a fussy thirty something in pinstriped shirts and glasses. It was his meticulous attention to detail and focus on the patterns of behavior that ended up making him perfect for picking apart the right and wrong things to say in an interview, or to a specific interviewer. His fast speech, seeming nit-picking and note cards were irritating to Tony but despite her sardonic comments he worked superbly with Maria Hill.

She should have considered the personality factors of putting Daniel with Clint ‘Hawkeye’ Barton.

“They did,” Natasha says turning her calming smile back on Pepper. Everything that made her an excellent assistant and an excellent spy all there in the way she seemed to read the sigh of concern welling up inside Pepper. “Hawkeye’s better with his other senses.”

“The talking heads will tire of this eventually. Celebrity children, however…”

“Egh. Celebrity?!” Barton actively cringes at the term and slumps down into the sofa beside the baby curled beneath her blanket.

Pepper stops herself from telling him not to wrinkle his suit, there will be a number of equally as fussy makeup people tailing Daniel with hand steamers if he needs them and Maria Hill to glower until Barton stays still enough to be steamed.

“I’m afraid you’re one of us now, Mr…” she blinks and corrects again, “Clint.” It is the suit that’s doing it, she tells herself, it’s so much easier to call him Clint or Hawkeye when he is mooching around Tony’s lab in a plaid shirt with a missing button.

“Does it get any easier?” he asks then and she feels blindsided by the sincerity of the question. His eyes are wide and she fears he’ll detect any fraction of a lie the second it leaves her mouth.

I had to take them in, Tony had told her, they were like lost lambs. She can see this now, understands, if only minutely, why Tony picked up the phone and in a very Tony way had asked what amounted to, Pepper fix this, they’re hurting my friends. She’d learnt to translate Tony Stark a long time ago. It never ceased to be a blessing.

“You won’t be the one they’ll be asking about how to get your cat suit body back after a baby.”

“Seriously?!” Barton replies looking like he doesn’t believe anyone could honestly ask such a question, his head darts back to Natasha for confirmation. Pepper makes a mental note that Barton does not think of a woman’s body as public property and she smiles. “Remember when we had important…” his gaze drops quickly to the baby, “stuff…” and back to Natasha, “to do?”

Barton, Pepper notes, does not want to curse in front of his child. This adopted family of Tony’s is insane and, at the same time, incomprehensibly sweet.

Natasha only smirks, “Says the man who didn’t need to take lingerie shots to shadow someone.”

Oh good lord, Pepper thinks, SHIELD knew exactly what button to press with that plant. There is a traitorous momentary thought that flashes though her mind, Natasha Romanoff’s endowments have only become more substantial since the birth of her daughter. She is grateful that the neckline of the former spies dress sits well above said endowments.

“I offered,” Barton responds quickly.

“After this we can ask Tony if that would have worked as well,” she offers matter-of-factly, “Natasha, it will be as you rehearsed. No surprises.”

“Better not be. If you want me to do the whole…” Barton begins to offer before Natasha cuts him off.

“Clint, I faced down congress, I can do this. Just smile when Pepper tells you to.”

“Not Pepper,” Pepper says, smoothing her skirt before standing, “Pepper has a business to run. Daniel. Smile when Daniel tells you to.”

Please don’t torture my PR staff, she thinks.

“And don’t say anything Maria would beat me up for… got it,” he says, that dry drawl she has come to expect from him returning. When she turns back towards Barton and Natasha, he has lifted the sleeping child into his arms, “Daddy’s not gonna shoot anyone Lizzie Bee and Mama’s gonna be impressive,” he says gently into the down on top of the baby’s head.

“And Captain America will be your babysitter, [моя](https://translate.google.com/?ie=UTF-8&hl=en&client=tw-ob#auto/en/%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%8F%20%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F%20%D0%BF%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B0) маленькая птица,” Natasha says following them by standing. Her blur of unfamiliar Russian sounds is amazingly soothing. She leans towards the baby on Barton's shoulder and with a flash of green adds, “Remember screaming is for our enemies and not our allies.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter goes out to icarusinflight. I know I say it all the time but thank you so much to everyone who keeps reading this despite my erratic update schedule and Australian spelling that I can't always catch. Every kudos, bookmark and comment has meant the world to me. Truly, more than you can imagine. I hope you are all still enjoying this one. XXX
> 
> DVD extra if you click on the underlined Cyrillic Russian you can read Google translate for them and hear the words said. 
> 
> transparentlyfallingasleep.tumblr.com


	24. Sam Wilson

“You have got to be kidding me?” he says when Steve opens his door holding Romanoff’s baby. Thankfully the baby is squished comfortably against the Captain’s large chest and so he doesn’t have to see the kid make a scowl that a kid that small shouldn’t be able to make.

“It’s been over seventy years since I was around kids,” Steve says, pushing the stray lock of hair back on his head. He looks more flustered than a super soldier has a right to look.

“And you put your hand up for babysitting,” Sam finishes flatly for him. You put our hands up for babysitting. So much for his vacation, so far he’d spent too much time hanging around Tony Stark’s well-appointed Avenger storage unit and not enough time using Captain America as the excellent wingman he was meant to be.

“You’d prefer Stark or Banner?” That’s the options for nanny? Hulk or billionaire? Why not Thor, Prince of Asgard? Is there no sixteen year old who needs a little gas money and can be trusted to keep their trap shut? Seriously, this kid is going to have so many issues.

“Why _am I_ here?”

“You have psych training.”

“I’m a VA counsellor, you think the kid needs to talk about seeing IEDs on the corner of Broadway and…”

“You’re good with people?” Cap interrupts with a pleading expressions that Sam can’t ignore.

“Man,” he exhales heavily, shaking his head, “are you lucky you inspire loyalty.”

Cap grins with relief, “If anything happens to her I doubt that will save me from Natasha and Barton.”

Sam has a host of nieces and nephews as well as cousins all over the lower 48 and he knows how hard his ass would be handed to him if he’d dropped any one of his sisters’ kids. He smirks, “Super serum be damned, you’ll be so dead. Like black dude in a horror movie dead.” Steve frowns and Sam just waves him off, “So we going to the park?”

Women love men with babies.

He follows Steve back into the main living area of the suite. It’s still lacking any homey touches. It makes Sam think of the way you set things up between tours but he notes that the 1940’s stuff that had been all over the shelves are mostly missing and beside the Stark pads on the coffee table is a growing collection of books all with the spines well broken.

“Only if Tony has one in the building.” Sam shrugs, opening both his hands to covey how little he’d be shocked if the massive tower had a playground in it. A super ritzy chuck e cheese is what he’s picturing. “Those news people will do anything for a photo.”

“Paparazzi,” he fills in out of habit.

“Yeah… Internet, helpful.” There is a black leather bag on the couch and it looks like the kind of thing you use when trying out cat burglary. Cap continues, “Some things don’t change. Cameras got smaller, people with them are just as pushy.”

“Stay away from urban dictionary, okay? I don’t think I can handle you telling me something was on fleek. So bro-ing out with a baby and no beer,” he says and claps his hands together, “Fun times will be had by all.”

“Barton will probably come claim her before Natasha’s done. I don’t think Pepper’s media kid wanted him on camera for long.”

“Because he does that Hawk stare thing?” he asks shrugging off his jacket. He notices the bottles sticking out of the cat burglary bag and smiles. It’s nice to know the woman who kicked him out of the way of a bullet wasn’t completely surrounded by fluffy bunnies and the like.

“I think he makes the kid nervous.”

“The one in the shirts with cufflinks, raps his fingers against the table when he’s thinking?” Sam asks turning back to Cap. “The one that always seems nervous?”

“Yeah,” Steve shrugs his admission, “Daniel O’Malley? O’Leary? Something like that.”

The kid Steve is talking about, the one with the detailed notes on everyone who comes anywhere near an Avenger, has a receding hairline and NASA circa 1957 glasses. The kid looks a lot like that one solider in every war movie who’s a coward and cries before getting killed off.

“You know that kid’s actually older than you?” Actually but not technically, physically but not chronologically. It used to be that the weirdest things he dealt with was missions he couldn’t talk about and wings.

Steve is rocking back and forth on his feet as the Romanoff–Barton offspring begins to struggle. “If Stark’s going to keep calling me old man then everyone not my boss or with their own kids is a kid,” he says tiredly.

“Soooo…”

Steve looks up at him and deadpans, “I look at you and I see a 12 year old.”

Sam crosses his arms, shaking his head, “Is that any way to talk to your salvation?”

“Hold her for a minute. There’s a bottle.” Cap ignores any response Sam might give and confidently pushes the wriggling kid into his arms, “She cries if I put her down,” he adds.

“How you doing, baby spy? I thought you never cried.”

“I don’t think Barton or Natasha ever put her down,” Steve replies over his shoulder as he heads into the kitchen.

Sam hits the remote and is rewarded with a large full screen shot of Natasha in a business dress, her long hair pinned up, she smiles warmly off camera.

“This thing is going out live?”

“Apparently it looks more honest if it’s live. It used to be things were true or a lie… how do you get more honest?” Cap asks over the sound of a microwave.

“I’m sure many people sitting at home are asking themselves if it is responsible to bring a child into the world given the clear dangers of your chosen profession and that of the child’s father.”

“Yeah and many people at home can shut the hell up,” Sam doesn’t stop himself arguing with the plastically attractive blonde on the screen. “What? They’re gonna take kids from firefighters and soldiers next?” The Natasha on the screen smiles again and tilts her head as if the question was not a big ass insult and is in fact worthy of consideration. TV Natasha’s smiled more often in the last ten minutes than Sam’s seen her smile in the entire time he’s known her. “Your mom’s lookin’ good though, short stuff,” he says to Natasha’s little girl who stares back like she’d really like to have the hand eye coordination to grab his nose.

“She hasn’t tried to kill them yet,” Cap says behind him, baby bottle in hand and a frown on his face. He has to be thinking what Sam is too, that Natasha should be shrugging like the questions she is being asked are so moronic they aren’t worth the breath she’d expend to answer them. The kind of shrug she’d give before breaking into Fort fucking Meade.

“It’s more impressive that they’re still asking questions if Barton’s down there scowling at them,” he laughs, “You think we could go down and watch in person?” A little show of strength, him, Cap, Ironman, the Hulk, Thor’s arms and Barton’s scowl just standing outside of frame. Imply baby spy would be better off somewhere else now.

Steve looks a little disappointed as if he’s been reading Sam’s mind. He gestures for the return of said baby spy. “Hill and Daniel would burst into flames if we brought this little bundle anywhere near the press.”

They both look back to the screen where Natasha isn’t trying to pretend to be the perfect 1950’s housewife. Sam decides that Daniel and his team have seemed to have agreed on a mix of first lady and Angelina Jolie as the way to present Natasha Romanoff ‘Mother’ to the world.

“You look marvellous, how have you returned to such peak physical fitness so soon after the birth?”

Sam runs his tongue over his front teeth to try to stop the chuckle.

“They want her fitness regime?” Steve says appalled.

“They want to talk about her bra size and if she has stretch marks. They just can’t come right out and say it,” he answers over whatever insane answer Natasha has been told to give. “I heard the Avengers’ statement on the morning shows. Nice. Bland but nice.”

“Ridiculous. You’d think she was a princess,” Cap says looking down at the baby eagerly sucking at the bottle in his hand.

“She kinda is, Cap, first of a dynasty,” Sam answers. Her grey blue eyes close leaving a fine white gap, a sign of a kind of calm enjoyment that Sam is sure isn’t possible once complex thought comes into play. As if to punctuate the thought, Clint Barton is suddenly on screen shaking the interviewer’s hand and managing without a sound to convey the feeling that he’d rather be somewhere high and distant. He also seems to actively be trying not to wipe his hands on his suit trousers.

“Hey look, your Daddy’s tryin’ to be friendly,” Sam says, trying not to laugh. The people on screen retake their seats and Natasha crosses her legs again adjusting seamlessly to the way her partner seats himself upon the couch. Clint tugs once at the trouser leg on his left knee and Sam sees the infinitesimally small moment Natasha pushes her own thigh against his as if reminding him she is still there.

“Clint,” the interviewer says and Barton looks up with sharp eyes zeroing in on the interviewer’s face like she is a target. The lady doesn’t flinch, to her credit, and carries on like the people sitting opposite her couldn’t kill her in so many ways it would begin to sound like a Roadrunner cartoon. “What do you have to say to the people who consider your unwed status as parents a poor example to set as role models?”

Sam feels Steve pull upright to attention without even having to look. They’d run Barton and Romanoff through media training and they’d assumed The Captain would be well behaved in every situation. They hadn’t factored in the indignation of a righteous man. Sam wonders if he should shut the TV off when Barton begins to answer.

“Plenty of people get married and divorced every day, ma’am,” Clint says his voice a little heavier on the farm boy drawl than Sam has heard around the tower. “Natasha and I have been through a lot more than most people in all the time we’ve known each other and we’re still partners.” It surprisingly sounds less like a rebuke than Sam expected. Clint sighs a little, gives a shrug and the camera pulls in loosing Natasha for the first time since Sam had turned on the interview.

“Look, it’s called a private life ‘cause it’s private and I intend to keep it that way but if people are gonna make us role models, I can’t stop ‘em, then, well, they’ll see two people raising their daughter the best way they can.” Sam raises his eyebrows, if this is as harsh as Barton gets the world’s press is getting off easy.

Then Barton looks down the barrel of the camera as if he was sighting a shot and the same grey blue eyes the baby has are starring down every single person in the audience, “Anything beyond that is none of their goddamn business.”

The interviewer, ever professional, only pauses for a moment longer than she would if Barton had described his personal cheesecake recipe and not threatened the world and then she throws him a soft ball, “What do you think of being a father?”

Everything in the man’s face changes, softens, his left hand moves in frame and pulls Natasha’s into in. “It’s life changing. It’s a miracle. She’s a miracle.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello readers, commenter, kudosers and people who got lost looking for better fanfic :)
> 
> This chapter goes out to trolololo for the first new commenting on the Pepper Potts chapter. Sorry this chapter took so long, fighting a bout of insomnia did nothing to help me get into a Sam Wilson mind set. Daniel the media kid is based on an actual internet person because I'm not creative enough to create my own people I just steal others... though as my tumblr says I have written half a zombie novel ;) 
> 
> What Clint has to say about the media some of you will recognise as eerily similar to what Jeremy Renner has said in past interviews because again... not that creative. 
> 
> If you get bored stop by transparentlyfallingasleep.tumblr.com and say hi or comment, I do love a comment. 
> 
> Thank you again. 
> 
> New chapter soon.
> 
> x


	25. Bruce Banner

Bruce manages to avoid tripping over the many cords tangled over the floors until the last moment. It isn’t entirely his desire to avoid anyone from the press corps or Stark Industries marketing that makes him awkwardly fall forward and cover by breaking into a sudden jog, Agent Barton is sitting, or rather perched on an unmanned [camera](http://eyesofageneration.com/media/images/bobby/Gallery_Images/Today_Camera/tv-cameras.jpg) assembly.

“Agent," he corrects, "Barton,” he says looking up and steadying himself, “Sorry, Clint.”

“What’s up, Doc?” Barton says staring off over the huddle of press people.

For a moment he is lost for words, “Er?”

“Sorry,” Barton flashes a smiles and then turns his gaze back to the huddle, “couldn’t resist.”

“I don’t want to distract you.”

“No, you’re not,” Barton insists still staring off into the distance, “Nat told me to make myself scarce. Pepper’s Danny boy told me to never say goddamn on national TV again and to make myself scarce and Maria did that jaw thing that I think might mean I’m getting written up even if there’s no file to write me up in anymore. Distract me. You’ll be doing me a favor.”

“I’m not certain I’m doing a very good job then, you seemed to be very focused on the proceedings.”

Barton chuckles, “That’s ‘cause I’m insubordinate by nature.” He jumps down, bending at the knees so his landing is much softer than expected, “Come on, Doctor Banner. I should rescue Lizzie from Cap.” He shrugs a little, “Or Cap from Lizzie. Walk with me?”

“Happily. Television crews make me nervous.”

Barton slips into an easy strut and throws him a sidelong glance, “As long as it’s not angry.”

“Do they make you angry?”

“Thought you weren’t that kind of doctor?” Barton apparently ponders aloud after a short pause.

“Therapist, you mean?” Bruce says pushing his glasses back up his nose, “No, never had the temperament but then I’m not a pediatrician either.”

“Is that what this little chat’s about?”

Bruce finds himself smiling softly at the quick way Barton assesses and reassess the conversation without the bluntness of his partner when she isn’t working, “Yes and no.”

Barton stops abruptly and Bruce twists to avoid the archer in his path. “Did something show up in Lizzie’s tests?”

“No,” Bruce says and then shakes his head when he finally registers the concern in Barton’s voice “No, not at all.”

“Natasha’s?” Barton asks his voice clipped.

“Oh no,” Bruce finds himself rushing to explain, “It’s nothing like that. It’s she’s due, over due in fact, for her vaccinations.”

“Nat?”

Bruce stares at Barton for a moment seeing his own confusion reflected in the other man’s face. Blondish, spiky hair and blue eyes where there should be a mess of brown curls and dark eyes but otherwise identical expressions. He shakes himself free of the absurd moment. “Elizabeth,” he corrects.

He knew an Elizabeth once. She had blue eyes. He’d never been one to wax poetic on the differences in the color blue of the human iris but Barton’s little Elizabeth’s eyes were shockingly not the blue he expected to see when presented with a child called Elizabeth. His Elizabeth had hair that tangled in knots when she twisted it back to look down her microscope leaving tendrils of brown to warp around her face as she concentrated. His Elizabeth was never a Lizzie.

Betty was gone now, safe from the danger he wrought.

He hasn’t been listening. He has mindlessly followed Barton as he entered the elevator.

“Right. Yeah. Never even thought about that stuff,” Barton continues to mutter, “Yeah, okay.”

“You’ll need one.”

“Vaccinations? I’ve had plenty, Doc,” Barton say, “I’m practically immune to everything now.” The younger man tugs at the tie pulling it out from beneath the vest he wears.

“Pediatrician,” he smiles, “Though I did note the small pox vaccine scar on your right shoulder.”

“Yeah.” Barton’s hands are busy pulling apart the buttons of the vest and finally the top button of the shirt beneath.

“Long story?”

“Not really,” Barton says relaxing into the word and running his hand back through his hair. With that final movement he seems to shift back into the t-shirt clad jock personae Bruce has seen wandering around the tower often seeming totally unaware of anyone else in the building. He’s called a greeting to him once or twice through the giant glass partitioning walls that Stark Industries is famous for to no avail.

“Big needle. Little blister. No Pox,” Barton grins.

He’s seen the reaction to the small pox vaccine and a [little](http://www.bt.cdc.gov/training/smallpoxvaccine/reactions/images/normal_timelines2.jpg) blister is the kind of understatement he knows to expect from Natasha and is teaching himself to expect from this man. His Elizabeth, Betty, was a cellular biologist. He doesn’t flinch at the name his mind provides. He doesn’t flinch anymore, even if the grief lays in wait in the quiet moments.

“You’ll need a pediatrician,” He reiterates as Barton exits the elevator. He can see Barton nod as he follows but knows not to trust that its agreement. Superheroes, it seems, are terrible patients.

By his count Captain Rogers was waiting at his door or sprinted across the floor to open the door barely three seconds from Barton’s efficient rap.

“Barton! Doctor Banner!” Steve says with a warm smile.

“Cap,” Barton rumbles in a way that suggests to Bruce that some part of the man wants to salute. “I believe you have something of mine?”

“She has some lungs on her,” Sam Wilson says from behind the Captain. “You have got to get her playing the trumpet or something ASAP.” He says the acronym instead of spelling it out. In his arms the Barton Romanoff baby is scowling with concentration, her pink lips wrapped around her own fingers.

“Wilson,” Barton says instantly reaching out for his child, “Rogers dragged you in for this?”

“When going into battle you’ve got to bring your best soldiers,” Steve replies stepping back into his apartment and collecting the deceptively random articles that accompany babies wherever they go.

“She’s not even ten weeks old,” Barton says looking into his daughter’s eyes, his free hand dances above her for a moment his thumb waving back and forth once before his hand clenches leaving his index finger pointing towards the apartment’s doorway and he drags it across the space in front of his body.

“She’s the Black Widow’s daughter,” Sam says leaning against the door frame.

“Tell me about it,” Clint grins back at him.  

“She had a bottle and she slept for…” Steve says returning with a tactically looking bag filled with bottles and blankets.

“Not long enough,” Wilson finishes for him.

Bruce reaches for the bag, looking for something to do with hands even for a trifling amount of time.

“Hey Lizzie Bee,” Barton’s free hand shifts again thumb and index finger free, then flat palm thumb tucked inwards. “You causing trouble?”

“Damn man,” Wilson laughs, “She’s gonna be trouble when she’s older. Look at that face. No one would believe she screams the roof down if you so much as hint she’s going to be put down.”

“You think she’s going anywhere without her daddy checking up on her?” Clint says dryly.

“You think she could fool Natasha?” Steve says an ironic furrow between his eyebrows.

“You’re right,” Sam says and presses his finger to the baby’s nose, “Almost feel sorry for her.”

“Natasha’s still being interviewed?”

“Photos. I think. No photos for me and Lizzie,” Barton answers adjusting Elizabeth so that she rests against his shoulder, “No photos for Lizzie.”

“It’s a shame.”

“Private life, Cap,” Barton says firmly and his smile disappears.

“I mean, now days it’s so easy to take photos,” Steve says his arms falling by his sides like he is rethinking his words, “but a family photo that’s something that’s still special. I wouldn’t want your family to miss out on that.”

There is an odd pause. It looks as if the Captain wants to fill it with something more effective, a better explanation. Before the stuttering sound of conversational repair can begin Barton echoes, “Family photo. Vaccinations. Rocking chairs.”

“Clint?” Bruce finds himself asking, the strange list seems like something they shouldn’t be eavesdropping on.

“We’re good,” Clint says turning to him his eyes almost flicker like someone turning on a flash light. “Uh, thanks for the help today,” he says to Wilson and Rogers.

“Happy to help,” Steve replies like the odd moment never happened.

Sam just shrugs and says, “You owe me a beer, a six pack.”

In the elevator Barton takes the bag from his shoulder and offers, “Thanks”

“Baby sign?” he muses conversationally to fill in the emptiness of the ride down.

“What?”

“You sign? On occasion?” This is not something he should have brought up. He is very certain that this is something he should have ignored. “When you talk to Elizabeth?”

“Oh. Right.”

“The studies indicate that language acquisition isn’t [significantly](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6661942) faster with sign than with speech for normally developing infants,” he continues to speak. He licks his bottom lip and closes his eyes. Close proximity to Tony Stark has done something to his brain. They could have had a silent ride down to Barton’s apartment and then he would have gone straight on to his lab. Instead he sounds like he’s insulting an assassin’s infant care skills.

“It’s, uh, habit,” Barton says in a low voice. “Not something we got off the internet.”

“I’d wondered if…”

“I use ASL,” Barton says looking up from his daughter, “Natasha’s is almost fluent. I guess I never even thought about what my hands were doing with Lizzie.”

“Of course,” he says and takes his glasses off to clean.

“Lost some of my hearing as a kid,” Barton offers. Bruce puts his glasses back on without wiping them against the cloth in his pocket. “Lost it again as an [adult](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eSPxZ6es1xs/VI9PBJV4FcI/AAAAAAAAScE/kai8dwbXnxw/s1600/hawkeye-header-750x387.jpg). I’d appreciate it if that didn’t go beyond us. With the aids I can do just fine in the field.”

Barton’s eyes narrow and then he drops his gazes to Elizabeth.

“No, of course.” He is very aware of his own hands now. He wants to put them in his pockets but is worried he doesn’t remember how. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“We don’t want another pediatrician,” Barton says suddenly.

“Sorry?”

“You have to monitor Lizzie anyway, just in case, right? Doc, Bruce, Natasha trusts you. I know it’s a big ask and you’re not really… after today…” Barton says going somewhere in his brain that Bruce is not privy to, “I think we can swing it if you’re her doctor,” he nods sharply. “It feels right.”

Bruce can tell from the finality of that statement that Barton is a man used to going with his gut.

“And Natasha?”

He’d apologized to her. He’d done his best to repair what he could. Somewhere in the depth of his soul he still felt no matter how often he got to deliver good news about the health of her child it would never eradicate the terror in her eyes as he began to transform. Barton might think he trusts him but Barton hadn’t yet experienced that visceral terror.

“I mean I’ll ask her, I always ask her, but I think we’d both feel better if you were the one with the needle.”

“I’ll talk to Tony about getting in the [vaccines](http://kidshealth.org/parent/pregnancy_newborn/medical_care/immunization_chart.html#a_2_months).”

“Okay?” he nods hopefully at Bruce, “Okay. Okay, Lizzie Bee. Okay.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been so long between updates wonderful readers. I'll do my best to get back on some kind of schedule. As always DVD extras for the chapter are linked via underlined text. 
> 
> Clint is signing with one hand the ones that Dr Banner catches are 
> 
> 10 - what we Australians call the good hand moved with thumb tip tilted once in front of the body non dominant to dominant side.   
> Week- what we Australians call the point hand shape move in front of the body from non dominant to dominant side. The full sign is slid over the non dominant flat handshape palm upwards however Clint is signing one handed and not aware that he is doing it.  
> L - this handshape is called the gun hand in AUSLAN   
> B- this is the flat handshape with the thumb drawn in across the palm in AUSLAN to produce the ASL letter B 
> 
> http://deafsocietynsw.org.au/documents/SignLanguage1Handouts.pdf In case you feel like looking at handshapes and AUSLAN information. 
> 
> Thank you all once again for continuing to read and comment and kudos. 
> 
> This chapter goes out to Stargroomer the first new commenter (without their own chapter) to comment on the Sam Wilson chapter


	26. Dr Jane Foster

There is possibly egg, possibly mustard, crusted on the end of her scarf, she can’t remember when she last wore it or managed to put it in with her laundry. Jane tucks the frayed edge back under her coat and hopes that Thor hasn’t noticed that she was picking at it. She hasn’t been out of the lab for two days so she hopes the sweater she’s wearing underneath the coat was clean before she put it on because it isn’t now.

He is very sweet standing there with his hair blowing in the wind in front of the two lawn chairs that used to live on the roof of her lab in New Mexico. The sun is hanging low in the sky but not low enough that the colors have changed from their standard blues to the oranges and pinks of a New York City sunset.

She pushes the bangs she’s trying to grow out back behind her ear before she say, “I should go back to the lab. The simulation probably finished running by now.”

“Your work will be there in an hour,” he says as he herds her gradually back to the plastic lawn chairs.

“Yes but…” she says refusing to sit.

“Then you can breathe in clean air for another hour.”

“I can’t believe you got Darcy to send you these [chairs](http://simplywallpaper.net/pictures/2011/05/16/Thor-Movie-Wallpaper-9.jpg),” she says narrowing her eyes. Thor will not be moved on this he is a giant immovable Norse wall. Normally she would unstoppable force him anyway but he did get her lawn chairs which took forethought and a level of romanticism that all her other boyfriends lacked, preferring their own egos to any need to work for her affection.

“She complained vociferously,” Thor says smiling as she takes a seat, “and said I must pay for shipping.”

Which meant she was going to pay for rusty old lawn chairs to be shipped to Tony Stark’s New York monument to himself. Unless Thor got a job moving pianos or modelling she was going to be paying for a lot of things; Prince of Asgard was a surprisingly unpaid position.

“But she got them out of the storage unit?”

“I am, in her words, ‘lucky I am eye candy’”

“I still can’t figure out how she made her [ring tone](https://33.media.tumblr.com/448e48cb73260748c4e9c2d456d9416d/tumblr_n9a2szinIE1tnwl1co1_500.gif) that song about nay [naying](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NvxyjjoeaM). I haven’t seen her in months.”

Her intern had gone home a few months earlier to finally finish the course work required to get her Master’s degree. Apparently Dr Jane Foster’s science intern wasn’t getting that done and she didn’t pay enough for Darcy to put it on hold indefinitely.

Darcy Lewis still answered the phone whenever Jane couldn’t find a file on her computer and had set up alarms to go off on her phone to remind her to eat. She was pretty sure Darcy and Erik had a facebook group about keeping her sane and fed.

Thor sits beside her and the metal creaks a little with his weight. “And yet young Darcy has insisted that I take much care of you.” He pushes her hair back from her forehead. She can’t help but look up at him, he is a pretty much a giant. “I am to make certain you eat regularly and leave the sciencing for reasons besides intergalactic relations.”

Jane screws her eyes shut hoping that maybe the innuendo went over Thor’s head. She opens one eye to peer at him, “She said it just like that didn’t she?”

“Indeed,” Thor says nobly. She sighs and opens both eyes only to be caught in the wake of his booming laughter. His laughter subsides quickly as he wraps her into what feels like a bear hug.

It is far too easy to rest in his arms and stare up at the sky. Troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, exosphere, she labels silently, imagining the blueness dotted with sparse white clouds to be a [cross section](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/t48nT6SlqD0/hqdefault.jpg) diagram in her thin black notebooks. When she looks back at him he is staring at her as if he could hear her thoughts.

“The light pollution will mean we won’t be able to see the stars,” she says, brushing the back of her hand against her cheek as a way of gauging if his unabashed gaze has brought a blush to her cheeks.

“Jane, if it is stars you wish for I will take you to them myself.”

“I think I’m okay right here for now.”

When Jane was a child she had mousy brown hair and a tendency to stay up at night with an old [National](http://www.dave.co.nz/space/museum/publications/national-geographic/images/0940.jpg) Geographic declaring the incredible universe was hers to explore. She took her English classes and her undergrad degree had demanded liberal arts but the concepts of swooning, true love and souls still seemed far less real to her than the possibility of alien life and faster than light travel.

“As am I,” Thor says. Despite herself she shivers a little and wonders again if swooning meant the overwhelming realization that you are but a speck in the vast unknowable universe and yet at the same time you could be someone’s whole world.

Of course it didn’t hurt that he was amazingly cut and able to lift her like she was a feather.

Maybe she did need to get out of the lab and breathe in some clean air.

“Natasha, welcome.”

“Thor, Jane,” Natasha Romanoff answers from behind them. Jane wishes she had a bell around her neck to warn of her approach. Her sister’s angry ginger tom had a bell around his neck to stop him killing the sparrows that took to avoiding their garden. Her navy dress hugs her curves and still she looks entirely professional in a perfectly precise, never needed an intern to remind me to eat kind of way.

“There is a roof top garden one floor down,” Natasha continues, “Away from the ducts. With lavish garden furniture.”

“Oh the lawn chairs?” Jane says extracting herself from Thor’s arms and standing up, “I had them on my lab’s roof in New Mexico. Long story, not important. I’m still talking? We can get out of your way.”

“No. I was looking for someone.” Natasha is eerily still.

“The Hawk was with Doctor Banner.”

Natasha tilts her head ever so slightly before responding, “Thank you. I thought he may have come here.”

“The height?” Thor asks.

“The distance,” Natasha replies.

Jane has kicked off her shoes. She is very short next to Thor’s immenseness. She lifts her chin slightly, “I thought it was very brave of you.”

“I’m sorry?” Natasha says twisting back towards her.

“Brave. Facing the media like that.”

“Ah. Yes,” Natasha smiles at her and Jane is again reminded of her sister’s angry tom cat, “It wasn’t quite defending the Earth from an alien invasion.”

“Sure,” Jane admits with a shrug, “Personal is harder sometimes, isn’t it.” There is a pause and Jane finds herself wishing she could be just as still as the Spy and the Thunder God at her elbow.

“I should go and find my partner.”

“No. No. Of course,” Jane says her hands unconsciously waving the woman away, “I didn’t mean to keep you.”

Natasha Romanoff’s lips quirk slightly and then she is gone as silently as she approached.

“I said the wrong thing, didn’t I?”

“No, I do not believe so,” Thor rumbles thoughtfully, “There are many things we may believe we are hiding from the world better than we are.”

“Like loving a child?” she says incredulously. She folds her feet under her body on the old lawn chair and pulls the scarf out to see if she can’t get the egg off the fraying tassels.

“That loving is often harder than fighting,” he answers, a distractingly warm presence on the seat.

“Is that how you feel?”

“In my youth, I thought of love and of battle as frivolity.”

“And now,” she asks gently, “old man?” She grins at him. His eyes crease beneath his very blond eyebrows.

“I see the dangers in them both.” She leans against him. Her shoulders telling her that she should not hunch over her tablet for longer than 30 min without a break. “You Midgardians are so short lived and fragile. The dangers are but multiplied.”

“Fragile?!” she says, her mouth a firm line.

“Comparatively.”

“Damn right, comparatively.”

“Jane, what you lack in physic you make up for in spirit,” he laughs. She stifles a yawn. “Jane?”

“Sorry, your arm is surprisingly comfortable.”

“Do you wish to sleep?”

“Maybe a nap. Before dinner.” Dammit, you step away from those screens even for a minute and suddenly your [melatonin](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21552190) is all let’s embrace your natural circadian rhythms, statistically insignificant her ass. Does she even have food for dinner? There was peanut butter. And two carrots she meant to eat. “I have cereal. No milk.”

“Sleep Jane.” He shifts her on to his chest, “I have arranged for a meal to be delivered.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi readers, new chapter is for Sandy_wmd who was the first new person to comment on the Bruce Banner chapter. Thank you all for continuing to read, comment and kudos. Dvd extras are as always included and if you want a particular point of view chapter let me know, I'm listening :)


	27. Natasha Romanoff

“Clint?” she calls, pushing through the door.

“Nat?” He is in the kitchen pulling a box of cereal from the top shelf.

She stops short, breathes in smoothly, “I looked for you on the roof.” Elizabeth isn’t with him.

“She fell asleep,” he says, tucking the box under his chin, bowl in his right hand as he pulls a spoon from the top drawer. “Thought she’d be better off in the crib. I think she tired herself out screaming at Cap and Sam.” He smiles to himself as he tips an overly large portion into the bowl on the counter.

“I looked for you.” And you weren’t there.

“On the roof,” he repeats muffled by the refrigerator door, “yeah, you said.” He lifts his head above the door, gives her a quick smile and bends again to reach the milk.

“I used to find you in the first place I looked,” she says.

His gait is recognizable, his footsteps have a rhythm of their own, he has habits and needs that he has let her see. She is not so foolish to imagine that he hasn’t let her track him though it should not be impossible for her to find him even if he wanted to remain hidden.

“And you woulda this time too but the kid had other ideas,” he frowns as the milk in his hand splashes against the side of the bowl leaving ghost shapes across the counter.

Her right hand circles her left wrist. She nods once before answering, “Thor said…”

“Tasha?” he says suddenly. “Are you okay?”

“Of course,” she says crisply, her hands releasing and then sliding over the stiff fabric of the navy dress. He frowns, his forehead furrowed in such familiar ways. He is hunched over the bowl on the counter perhaps using his forearm to support himself or protect the breakfast food from speedy thieves, “Thor said you were with…”

He has rid himself of the tie and the vest is undone and hanging loose, one half threatening to fall into the bowl but his eyes reflecting its blue back at her nonetheless, “You were amazing today. You’re amazing every day. Today, well, there’s probably a better word for it.” She stares at the spoon in the bowl and the navy, red and pinkish blur that must be her reflection in its surface. “One really long one you’d need a dictionary to spell. A word from poetry, you know?” he sighs the sound of it almost absent. She focuses on him again, his earnest frown, his eyes. “Didn’t want to take my eyes off you.”

He smiles softly, wistfully, like she is something bright and precious. He knows to look away before she dismisses the moment. She can see the shrug coming before his shoulders start to rise, he drops his eyes to the bowl scooping another mouthful of sugary cereal onto his spoon.

“Clint.”

“It wasn’t an error,” he says and then crunches down on the still crisp loops of processed wheat without looking up.

“What?”

“You went up to the roof,” he says and swallows. He looks at her then, his forehead creasing, “It was the right instinct. You still have me pegged.”

“I…” she says but it is on an inhalation.

Clint carries on as though it isn’t necessary for her to take part in this conversation. “Lizzie’s still making her mind up about who she’s gonna be. You’ll have her pegged too. She won’t be able to get away with anything. New variable,” he says offhandedly as if he just mentioned a sudden pick up in wind speed. “Bound to throw us off our game a little.”

Natasha allows herself two blinks of surprise.

“Thor said you were with Bruce.”

“Yeah.” He pushes back from the bench and wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. “The doc wants Lizzie to get her shots.”

“Vaccinations,” she echoes.

“With one thing and another we’re a little behind on the normal sh…” she doesn’t stop the smile. He has been trying so hard to remove the curses from his conversation, “stuff.”

“The normal stuff.”

“I told him we’d want him to do it. Figured you’d tell me if I’m wrong but I kinda trust the big green doctor man.”

It’s a syringe, made mostly of plastic. She could crush it under her heel. She brings her eyes up to the man holding it. His glasses have the impression of his right index finger left on the lower corner. His shirt collar is curled under. He has light brown freckles you can barely see. He is not a threat. Not now. His eyes are brown.

“You’re not wrong.”

“He’ll tell us when he has the stuff.”

“Yes,” she says and begins to feel the tiredness of the day settle in her bones. He crunches again on the cereal.

“Natasha.”

“Yes?”

“I needed to hold her.” Another scoop of cardboard and sugar, he isn’t looking up, he patiently eats instead of assessing her as she would him.

“Yes.”

“After all those stupid questions about how we were going to raise her and what…” His spoon clatters against the bowls edge. “I needed to hold her. If anyone can pick her up without waking her? It’s you.”

She unzips the dress as she passes over the threshold, wriggles it down over her hips to the floor. She can still hear the soft clink of metal spoon against crockery telling her despite the open door silhouetting her in stockings and underwear he has not looked up from his meal, such that it is.

Before pulling a t-shirt from the hamper she collects his coat crumpled from the bed and hangs it from the edge of the bathroom door. She unpins her hair scattering bobby pins all over the vanity and even spares a smirk as she rolls a stocking down her thigh with one leg balanced on the edge of the toilet seat. There are men who watched her today on national TV who would still pay good money just to see her roll her stockings down her legs and pull them from her toes. There are women who imagine her in fine white lingerie, red curls fanned about her shoulders, imagine smudging her perfectly coated lips with their own. They ignore the existence of the child in the bedroom, the man in the kitchen, the t-shirt she pulls over her head before removing the makeup they envy and covet.

She unclasps her bra from beneath the large t-shirt, sliding the straps off her shoulder and out the arms. Her breast feel hot and heavy. She’ll need to express if Elizabeth is not hungry. She sits on the bed and brings her legs around her. In the crib she can hear Elizabeth breathe, even and calm though sometimes catching against the limp structures of her infant throat. The baby sighs softly and then the suckling sound of lips and tongue working at a phantom nipple.

She quietly walks to the crib, slides her hand through the shielding feeling the moment of something static raising hair on the back of her wrist. Elizabeth’s cheek is warm but not overly so. Her eyelashes are long resting in the dip above her rounded cheek. Beneath the cloth swaddling her Natasha can see her tiny fist fly up, straining against the fabric in reaction to her touch. She weighs so little and fits so easily into Natasha’s bent arm.

“Don’t say anything,” she says when he looks up from his phone. Her feet sink into the carpeting. The t-shirt strokes at her thighs as she walks.

“Wasn’t gonna,” he says and dumps his bowl into the sink. “You want something to eat?”

“I don’t want cereal.”

“Yeah?” he says unsurprised, he eats like an eight year old without supervision, she does not. “I’ll make you an omelet.”

“Western?” she smiles.

“The only kind there is.”

“The only kind you know how to make.” She rounds the counter as he pulls ingredients from the refrigerator. She grips the counter and pulls herself up.

He chuckles, “I’ll take that as a ‘Yes, Hawkeye. I’d love the best omelet there is.’ Clint raises his eyebrows. “If you sit there, Tash, I can’t chop the ham.”

She shrugs, “Improvise, Hot Shot.”

“Improvise, she says,” he mutters and she pulls his face to hers, kissing as hard and as open as she can. His hands are quick, looping around her hips as she drags her own hands down around his shoulders. His mouth taste like sugar and milk dyed pink but he feels strong and certain. This part is easy.

He pushes her hair from her face and breathes a little harder than before, “What was that for?”

“I need a reason?” she asks, only an inch or two from his face.

“Need, no. Always have one, yes”

“It’s not that complicated.”

“I just look that good in a suit?”

She could smile. She could let that be her answer. Clint is owed more than that. Clint is owed a life.

“You always provide me with a clear exit.”

He nods once, a sharp nod that defines them. His thumb runs across her cheek bone. He smiles, “It’s my job.”

“Thank you.”

He moves away, untangling himself from her and heading toward the knife block at the other end of the counter. “Hey Tasha.”

“Mmm?”

“Thank you for letting me back in.”

She nods once and drops from the counter top. “Even when you forgot the Starbucks.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to all my readers for sticking with me. I know I don't update very regularly. Life has a way of getting in the way, in a less fun achievement based way and a more depressing failure based way. So thank you for continuing to read and comment. It helps. 
> 
> This chapter is for Autumn_froste the first to comment on Jane's chapter. I hope this chapter makes you all feel warm and squishy inside, after all it is why we consume the fluff. I also hope it rings true because there is nothing worse than knock off, sub par fluff. 
> 
> Going to see if I can get out a couple of chapters of Marketplace next because AOU still needs to be fixed but this story has not ended and will get a Darcy update as requested :)


	28. Steve Rogers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clintasha Advent Calendar Prompt Day Sixteen: Children

“Cap!” Barton says opening the door.  He is shirtless and the baby wriggles on his shoulder.

“Bart…”

“Here, hold the terror for a sec,” Barton interrupts passing over his child like she is a fruit bowl cupping her between his two large hands.

Steve’s hand comes out to claim her before he has given the matter much thought. The baby, Elizabeth, gurgles and then frowns.

“Is Natasha here?”

“Shower,” Barton answers, reaching over the couch and collecting a fresh t-shirt.  “Then Lizzie Bee decided breakfast looked better on me.”

“Oatmeal?” Steve asks, gesturing to the lumpy white residue crusting on Barton’s elbow.  Barton looks down at himself, his hair askew.

“No, that’s just baby sick,” he says attempting to remove it with what looks like the discarded t-shirt.  “It follows me around everywhere I go now. I thought blood was a futzing pain to get rid of but...” Barton looks up again, “Did you need something Cap? This isn’t some kind of surprise party thing again? ‘cause, I mean, it’s cool and all but Natasha and I are more ‘no party’ kind of people.” 

He frowns. Just like the baby.

“At ease, Soldier,” Steve smiles, “No party.”. 

“Great,” Barton says rolling quickly and easily back into what is fast becoming Clint and not Barton in Steve’s mind. 

They’d all underestimated him.  Stark and Banner were dangerously smart.  He was here for the heroics and Natasha; she was the chameleon. They hadn’t noticed him stealing little pieces of their skill sets.  They hadn’t realized Natasha Romanoff had never needed to slow down for him.  He covered for it all so well in a grin, a shrug and heavy layer of self-deprecating bravado.

“Steve?” Natasha says, dabbing at her hair as she enters.

“Natasha, sorry for intruding.”

She raises a single eyebrow, “Did Hawkeye here let you in?” 

“Uh, yes?”

“Then it isn’t an intrusion,” she smiles, “I’ll take the infant now.”

“Of course.” He tries to help remove Elizabeth from his shirt with a single hand but she has managed to shove part of his collar along with her own fist into her mouth.   

Natasha deftly untangles the damp shirt point and chubby fingers, “You came to rescue Clint from fifteen minutes left alone with his own child?”

“No!” he says almost shocked by the accusation until he looks up from his collar.  She looks amused and calm, smoothing down her child’s gingery hair with motherly inattention. “He didn’t need rescuing.  I.” He pauses and looks down at the brown leather folio in his hand. He begins again, “Christmas is a few weeks away.”

“There isn’t some kind of Avengers’ Secret Santa is there?” Clint says from the sink.  He is running water over the stained t-shirt. “Can I recuse myself?” 

“I’m not sure I…?” he says a little bewildered. It still happens occasionally, not as often as it once did but occasionally and often enough, talking to people felt like reading The Jabberwocky or taking a physiology class in French.

“He’s worried he’ll be expected to buy gifts,” Natasha answers as she looks to her partner accusingly, “We were always in some godforsaken jungle or other because Barton avoids wrapping paper with missions.”

As she is speaking they swap places as though it were a rehearsed dance he had no part in.  Natasha is tucking the baby into a padded carrier on the bench and Clint takes her place in the entrance way wiping his damp hands dry on the back pockets of his jeans.

Steve closes his eyes. “You said you didn’t have photographs.”

“Come again?” Clint says.

“The day of the interviews,” Steve says, “You said you didn’t have photographs of your family.”

“Right.”

“I have something for the both of you.  Consider it an early Christmas gift.” He hands over the brown folio and finds his now empty hand feels foolishly lost.

Clint takes the folio and opens it, sucking air between his teeth. 

Inside is a pen and ink rendering of their family.  He’d started it one night instead of returning to the heavy bag.

It is their couch, Barton perched on the left arm. Natasha, curled legs, on the right. Her head is tilted downwards, her red hair in loose waves like a curtain, as she looks at the baby in her lap.  Barton watches them both his smile more open and obvious than the soft, closed lipped expression on Natasha's face.  Elizabeth does not sit on her own but is rather propped up against her mother, red curls too short to be tucked behind her slightly pointed ears. Her large eyes take up most of her face and she stares out at the viewer, an old soul. 

“Tasha,” Clint whistles after a moment, “Tash, did you know he could do this?”

“Hmm?” she asks leaving the child in her seat.

“Captain America’s drawn…” Clint looks up at him, his sharp eyes unreadable, “Natasha, it’s a family portrait." 

Clint does not look away.  Steve would very much like him to look away now.

“She keeps growing so I hope I got her likeness…” he offers.

Natasha is at Barton’s elbow examining the image.

“Steve,” she says and it is too genuine.  He is going to blush. “Thank you.”

“It seemed right that you should have one,” he manages. 

“Aw Futz!” Clint exclaims pushing the folio and picture into Natasha hands.

“What?” she replies in the annoyed tone she saves for him alone.

“No, I mean, well,” Clint answers, scratching at the back of his neck. “I’m gonna have to buy stuff this year aren’t I? I don’t get to take a mission to Sudan with all this….” His gesture encompasses the picture, Natasha, the baby, even Steve himself.

“You thought you were taking a mission?” Natasha says caustically.

“No. Nooooo,” Clint answers quickly, taking a step back from his partner, “Of course not…” he looks back at Steve his expression pleading for help.  Steve has none to offer. “I don’t know what day it is unless JARVIS tells me, guys.”

Natasha does not look placated. 

“You think everyone would be okay with getting arrows?” Barton asks, defeated.

“No.”

“Well then,” Clint says his face breaking into a loose grin, “Lizzie, you wanna help Daddy online shop?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas everyone and because I am sure you are all fellow nerds of the modern era the biggest hugs for the loss of Carrie Fisher. I know I have been much delayed in getting you updates on this and my other stories please know they are not forgotten and I will update as often as I can. 
> 
> This chapter goes out to dssgirl for being the first to comment on the last chapter in this fic... so very long ago.... argh I am so sorry.


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